Sara Jane
C June 19, 2001

The thorns of the rose in my left hand bit hungrily into flesh, causing more pain than such a minor thing might be expected to. It was not the only source of discomfort.

Likewise, the wind had picked up and now blew mightily and, perhaps, ferociously past on its endless trek through the sky that ended only God and the Channel 11 weatherman knew where. It was cold, much colder than I might have predicted for an April afternoon, and it caught me off guard with only a thin cotton jacket covering my tee-shirt. I felt the cold as keenly as anyone, though I had become numb after a lifetime of its persistent ache. The cold hurt but it quickly presented itself as a force that could not be prevented, much like life.

I felt my skin begin to freeze and harden, a dimpled pattern appearing magically across my naked arms. In an instance like this, one feels naked whatever he may be wearing; the cold cut through fabric and seemed to surround your muscles despite the layers.

When one grows up in the northern part of the United States, he becomes intimately associated with anything that blew in off the Great Lakes. It was an involuntary education, and one perhaps best designed for the survival of the fittest, but it was by no means pleasant.

There are different kinds of cold, as any northerner would understand and take for granted, though this knowledge is unfortunately denied to those who live to the south. Whether this difference can be explained by human perception or whether nature purposely throws upon her creations a sampling of the types of her fury is rarely discussed, the main reason being that those most able to determine are the least likely to think about it.

There is the massaging, soothing iciness of an air conditioner on a hot day, which becomes incomprehensible in a hailstorm. There is the full bodied freezing of stepping out of a hot shower and into a force that attacks the body and seeks to sap all the heat from it, a force which the body continually overlooks when separated from it. There is cold in the full force of winter, which in turn comes in different varieties, among them numbness, tolerable cool, a bone chilling dart through a courtyard, a draining oppressiveness, a biting arctic wind, an enveloping cold and the lingering effects of frost that remains for several moments after finding heat again.

All these dissipate with time, however long that time may seem. There is, however, one variety that behaves entirely differently from all these, and some say belongs in a separate category. In truth it is just one more variety of a perfectly natural though unfortunate shaping of the world, although it might abide by different rules, and that is the coldness of the human heart.

Of all the varieties of cold, it is the one that those familiar with its distinct burn are least likely to speak of. Unfortunate, I say, for it is surely the variety that will drive a man mad the quickest when exposed. A brief taste, a lover’s scorn, and the soul stays frostbitten until such time as it learns to heal. The wound, like natural frostbite, grows deeper and more severe the lower the temperature drops. Should the temperature ever drop too low, it is perfectly conceivable that a heart might never recover.

Hearts in this stage of degradation respond to a different set of stimuli than ordinary hearts. They fixate, and one might say obsess, not on love and the many complications this involves, but on causing pain. Sometimes this is a wish for death, and sometimes it is an appetite for destruction that seeks the complete annihilation of everything; it is a feeling so true and so drastically opposed to the human condition as to be utterly beyond the scope of a sane mans comprehension. Sometimes it is far more specific, far more localized, and this is arguably the worst form that it can take.

Once a man has aimed his spite at a single target, man or woman that he feels has wronged him, there is no dissuading him in his path. His only thought is to cause his victim torture and suffering at any expense, even if he has to share in the anguish. There is nothing else that matters, and the feeling grows and intensifies until the only feeling he is capable of is cold rigidity. It is at that point, when his own pain utterly consumes him, that any other pain ceases to matter.

The wind gusted intermittently and seemed almost to pulse, threatening to double over my rose, the thorns of which had now embedded themselves in my skin deeply enough to draw blood, had the blood been flowing less sluggishly through the constricted purple capillaries of my hand. If the stem broke I would be left holding a useless blood red knob to no avail, money spent and time wasted. But, this too, was not the only source of discomfort.

Foremost occupying my mind at this moment was the long trek that lay before me. A driveway, a hundred miles, a long trek, it made little difference. It was like the first kiss, where a space of several inches suddenly becomes an indomitable distance that must be met resolutely and without apology. The reason for championing this distance lay in its goal, in the final meeting of lips and union of souls; and so too, I must constantly remind myself, lay the goal of this journey.

The two were exactly opposite, my journey and a kiss, for one marks the beginning of something unique and special in nature, and the other its undeniable end. And yet similarities abounded. The difference between this and a kiss lay only in the distance, and perhaps the difficulty.

The thought, however, spurs me on. If it were a kiss that started this, then perhaps a perverse variation would finish it. In spite of the difficulties, I must persist. Meeting the door at the end of the driveway was necessary; for good or ill I am beyond returning now. I only wish the conclusion were more apparent.

Surprisingly, after I take that dreaded first step, the remaining walk comes as no difficulty. Realistically the hesitation is absurd; there are no obstacles to stop me and nothing to sway me from my course. Once I take that first step, grim determination takes over. Once I am there, there will be no coming back down and it will seem to have been easy. That’s the way it always is, in these matters.

And before I can breath, I am there.

But where am I, exactly? I am facing a door, a red painted door that stands out prominently against the white paneling of the house. It is a picture of the American dream, located along a typical road in a typical suburban neighborhood, the grass mowed and the hedges neatly trimmed. Further up the driveway was built a small garage with one or two midsized vehicles parked inside. The residents were doubtless white Protestants with 2.2 children, or it could be speculated by a study of the front lawn.

Pink curtains closed over a view into the upstairs window, and outside, looking up at it as though it were the only object in the universe worth any attention, stood a young man wearing a High School jacket, the large yellow “C” seeming raised against the flat green fabric of the rest of the material. A single red rose in his hand pointed toward the cracked window, through which one might imagine he could see the dim silhouette of a 16 year old girl fixing her hair for some special occasion.

It might have been a painting, so perfectly did it capture the story everyone was guessing at. Yet, strip away a layer of watercolor and you may find more than canvas, for this picture of perfection contained more layers than a casual observer would imagine.

The beautiful middle-class house, at the same time as being such, was a fortress. It was barred to me by an impenetrable, red paneled gate, daring me to attempt entry. For all its simplicity it may as well have been the entrance to a vault.

All I need do is knock, but at this point, knocking seemed the hardest thing in the world. I was timid by nature, but usually managed to suppress it enough to seem friendly. What I had to do now was nearly impossible.

I closed my eyes and raised my hand. I prepared for my nerves to leap in response to the simple vibrations of the hard knuckles of my closed fist wrapping against a solid wooden frame. I prepared to forget my words the moment the door opened and to stutter in embarrassment. I prepared to be rebuked once again without another chance at reconciliation. You can not expect the unexpected; all you can do is prepare.

Only now did I truly question my reason for being here, and found myself lacking. I took a step backward down the driveway and prepared to turn.

My throat went dry just as I did so. In a freak of synchronicity and random momentum, I was poised at that instant, apparent now as it so rarely is, between a decision. Turn back or proceed, and myself trapped exactly between where consequences were born. Project my life forward from this moment and, somehow I feel it, everything that is to come may be entirely different.

Should I stay or should I go? Nature is full of these tiny choices we make everyday, and seldom do we pause enough to detect them. This time, someone noticed.

I could almost hear the rending of will, part of my mind pulling me forward and the other half pulling back. I tried to follow the streams of my probable future to see where they might lead, but they were all too quickly lost in the mindless streams of causality flowing forever forward in time, and I was left once again on my own to make the choice.

I raised my hand once again to the door.

Thock… Thock…

No answer, but I had chosen my path. Maybe somewhere, in some other reality, I had walked away. But not this one.

Thock… Thock…

The door squeaked open just as my hand flew forward for a fifth tap at the door. The portal now stood undefended, save for a red haired woman in her middle years standing before me. Her hands were clasped firmly in front of her, unconsciously barring the way, but the wrinkles around her brown eyes spread and grew deeper as she smiled and tightened her eyelids.

The words I had planned on wavered and threatened to fly away from me, but with a great effort of will I pulled them back to me and spoke with an only slightly fluttering, deep voice.

“Is Sara Jane there?”

I had no way of knowing just how much the girl's mother knew, but to my relief she turned her neck to the side and called out, in a voice that could be heard for miles, the name of the girl I had only just dared to speak aloud myself. It was a name which echoed in my heartbeat and which I had feared the voicing of might dissolve me. It was a name, hard to define, yet packed with every type of emotion available. It was a name that had made me cry and made me bleed, and however much I might dread its face, continued to haunt me through the nights since I last deigned to verbalize it.

The mother, who I had met only so briefly, suddenly turned and began up the stairs several paces into the room, clearing a direct line of sight from myself to the opening from which I feared what might emerge. I, realizing that I had snapped my hands in place at the small of my back once the door opened, quickly and awkwardly shuffled my arms such that the left held the rose pressed close against my chest, whereas the right buried itself deeply into the front coat pocket. Nothing could have prepared me adequately for this moment.

As she strode into the room, equally unprepared for the sight of my face in her doorway, I was at once jelly and steel. My mind was a thread strung as tightly as possible and infinitesimally close to breaking. Though I exuded a calm exterior, or so I hoped, not a nerve in my body failed to increase its tension. Within the jacket my chest shook, the beating of my heart rapid and thundering. My every muscle was clenched in anticipation, though anticipating what I could not be entirely certain.

The first thing I noticed, as in the first time I met her, was her hair. It was a wild shade of red and unlike any other, yet seemed perfectly natural sitting atop her head. Something about that shade suggested a personality, inexplicably, as though a person’s chromosomes could have a hand in giving them a dark side, or an enticing secret. It made her at once appear an interesting person, one that called on you to get to know her. It was, perhaps, her only appealing feature.

Once your eyes learned to put aside the hair, you quickly discovered that there was not an attractive aspect to the entire remainder of her body. Her eyes were a putrid shade of brown, like fruit that had fallen off the tree and been left to rot. Her overtly large nose dominated her face, even to the point of sucking air away from her throat to give her voice a spectacularly unpleasant nasal quality. To hear her speak was to experience a variety of discomfort only comparable to nails across a chalkboard, but to watch her was even worse. Almost unconsciously on meeting someone, her sunken eyelids would half close and her nose would wrinkle in what can only be assumed was an attempt at showing irritation.

The observer was inevitably led to wonder just how she was capable of being condescending, for to be condescending generally requires that something is lacking in the viewed that is possessed by the viewer. In the case of Sara Jane, there was not a desirable part of her nature or being, and yet she was the result of one of those great travesties that allows a physically unattractive and annoying individual to grow up believing themselves somehow gifted beyond the norm. A beautiful woman with an unkind attitude is a sin, but to find these same qualities in the homely, that is disaster.

Brown freckles covered the entire surface of her skin to such an extreme that it was not entirely possible to say just what shade she truly was. Yet, judging from mere contrast, she seemed drab and abnormally pale, as though all the color had been bleached from her expression. This was not helped by the manner with which her attempts at body language were inevitably uncoordinated and forced, or by her mouthful of tiny yellowed teeth. Watching her smile, even when under the spell of that increasingly out-of-place gift of hair, was never a breathtaking experience, but rather appeared as though she might suddenly attack, the nerves and unexplained creases in her face lurching and spasming in a way that made it look totally unnatural to her manner.

She wore a bulky red sweater, all the better to compliment her hair, but it also disguised her bloated frame and virtual lack of womanly figure. She was short and squat, and resonated with her personality, which was no more attractive than the way her waistband puffed and jiggled unceremoniously. Her pores oozed a film that greased and oiled her features and spoke of the effort she must make to present any satisfactory appearance. Her thighs resembled nothing so much as complete hams, her stomach sloshed and gurgled and her breasts were far too limp for her young age, though small enough to contrast with her sickening lower body. All this she somehow always managed to cover in loose fitting or thick clothing, the better to at least minimize those flaws that would force her to reconcile her ego.

She approached the doorway, the floor creaking beneath her bulk, close enough until her distinct odor filled my nostrils, as though she had not bathed in several days. Not only that, but I could virtually hear a liquid splashing of her gut, which splattered in time with her step as her shapeless form lumbered towards me. She leaned into the doorway, or at least her upper half did, her lower body hindered by the weakness of its muscles, and I watched once again as her eyes closed halfway and her nose wrinkled, obscuring the oils and the deluge of brown flecks on its bridge.

The site of her silent offence of my honor nearly made me want to throw my fist into her, just to shatter the visage of ironic smugness before me. For a moment I felt my adrenal glad shooting its intoxicating chemical into my bloodstream and my heartbeat jumped; my stomach wrenched, my muscles tightened and for a moment I feared I would lose control. Slowly I relented, but only hesitantly. I stuffed my fingers deeper into the pockets on the front of my coat, uncertain how this encounter would finish.

In a quiet voice, more than slightly embarrassed for being the initiator, I made the first move. Deep inside myself I knew her reaction to this greeting would determine what was to happen next. I was not certain I could hold myself back a second time.

“Sara Jane…” I started, “It’s been a long time.”

It was perhaps a flimsy start for a conversation, but my goal was only to avoid provoking her. I was not entirely aware of my purpose here, save that one way or the other I had to begin to warm myself, or at least to try. This conversation had to end, one way or the other, with a healing.

She stood there and looked at me, her insolently tightened eyes squinting into me, and made no move to respond or acknowledge my greeting. Still I held myself back, though teetering closer and closer to the brink, not sure how much longer I could hold myself from some action that may be irreversible. Still I waited, because it seemed the human thing to do. My patience was wearing.

And then, exactly as I had seen it so many times in my dreams, how instinctively I knew this would progress, Sara Jane made her response. Her eyelids widened slightly, and I watched as her pupil rolled from the bottom of her visible eye to the top. It was, once again, an unnatural movement to her, and obviously forced, but it harkened back too many memories.

I was not absolutely certain as to what she was now rolling her eyes at, but it scarcely mattered. It was the same response she had made the first time I told her I loved her.

She rolled her eyes.

It was the same response she had made when I said my last goodbye.

She rolled her eyes.

And now I stood here, hoping to make amends, and all she could do was stand there silently and roll her eyes.

She rolled her eyes.

There are no words to adequately express my revulsion at that moment. The need I had been repressing was suddenly brought to the fore, and I knew this time I would not be able to resist. As I watched her eye make that singularly innocuous motion, it nevertheless filled me with a fire I am at a loss to explain. At once my rational self seemed to completely shut itself down and I was powerless to the whims of my muscles and my heart, which were tensing themselves before I was fully aware of what I was planning and had sprung into action immediately upon her insult.

In lieu of punching her, however, my fist tightened on the frigid metal object contained in my pocket, as though I meant to crush it in my grip. All my might seemed focused into holding onto that item, only partially compensating for my frustration at being unable to smash her façade with it. My neck strained with the force with which my teeth ground together, although at that point all sensations were alien to me and nothing mattered more than the obliteration of that unholy spectacle before me.

My only thought to use the energy that was now overflowing my dazzled senses. I ripped the piece from my pocket with a force that tore the seams of my jacket. It mattered not; I raised my father’s Glock at her head and attempted to point it directly between her eyes.

I think I intended to speak to her one last time, simply to force her to acknowledge that I had won, or that I would, but my eagerness overwhelmed me. Not a full second after I had aimed, the recoil of one powerful shot reverberated through my arm, and the loud blast nearly popped my already clenched jaw.

Remorse was beyond me. Fear of consequences was beyond me. There are times when action is simply necessary.

I remember only that her eyes widened minutely, perhaps surprised I would dare, or perhaps daring me to squeeze the trigger. It was a reaction I had not anticipated, though not beyond reason, and in truth I cared not. When my eyes, which had shut involuntarily at the aftershock of my deadly blow, once again viewed the scene, Sara Jane slowly tilted forward in the doorway, an olive sized hole drilled over her left eyebrow.

Only now did panic overtake me, though only fear of how I might avoid capture and not, as might be expected, any sort of regret. I knew what I had done was deserved, and as I peered into the immense tunnel in her forehead, I felt a kind of satisfaction I had not experienced in some time. It was as though my life had been building to the shot, and now that it had been fired, all that was required was for me to deal with the loose ends.

The lifeless corpse of Sara Jane fell over onto me and I, still questioning what to do next, caught her head in my hands. I knew only that whatever my actions from here on, I had to do them quickly. I knew that the best I could wish for was to avoid the worst of the consequences, but it was a result I had been prepared for. With full knowledge that seconds mattered, my mind raced to buy myself as much time as possible.

It is fortunate for me that in my moment of panic, it did not slip my mind that my car had been left unlocked at the base of the driveway. Observing no more preferable way to flee the scene of the incident, I threw one arm round her dead neck and began to drag her down the driveway by her skull, allowing her useless body to trail after her.

It is strange the things one notices in a moment of panic, how seemingly obvious details can sometimes slip the mind completely, while minute details sometimes appear in painstaking reality. The first thing I noticed, as I secured my grip on the brightly colored head of a now extinct Sara Jane, was that there was no exit wound in its back. The bullet was still lodged somewhere inside her cranium, possibly her brain, which would account for her immediate cessation of breathing as shock set in. This struck me, also, as an unbelievable fortunate event, for without a bullet and without a body, investigators had to evidence to site just whose gun the round was fired from.

The second thing I noticed was the thump I had detected within the house moments after I had turned. Responding only to instinct, I allowed the momentum of my spin snap my head back over my shoulder even as I stepped off with my right foot. At the exact same incident I raised my left hand, which I had shifted the weapon into in order to better carry the body, and fired a volley into the house. I perceived only dimly through the door what I interpreted to be the form of Sara Jane’s mother clamoring down the stairs as she dove out of view to avoid the shots I had just fired.

I was halfway down the driveway at this point, when my eyes fell to the ground and observed a trail of red dots tracing the way to my waiting vehicle. The wound had evidently begun to bleed.

“Shit,” I hissed, and immediately began to examine what this might mean. I heaved a sigh of relief as my head snapped back around. The only thing they would be able to prove from the blood trail is that Sara Jane had been shot, and that someone had carried her at a rapid pace to the base of the driveway. There remained nothing of myself at the scene, footprints or hairs, to determine that I was at fault more than the testimony of the mother.

And the mother, I reminded myself, may or may not have known my name.

As I reached the door of my jet black Mustang, waiting at the curb unlocked in case of a need for a quick escape, I thrust my left arm forward in a mad grab for the handle. The weapon dented the glossy exterior and my fingers jammed against the hard surface, but the pain hardly mattered in relation to the thrill of my victory, and I reminded myself that the car would be gone in seconds. I shifted the body now into the crook of my left arm, pointing the weapon once again at the door should cover fire once again be required, and with my free right hand I maneuvered open the single door on the right side of the vehicle.

Wasting as little time as possible, I threw myself across the clutch and drug my unique passenger in after me by her hair. Fumbling to jam the key into the ignition, I leaned across and pulled the passenger door closed after me, strapping my safety belt only as an afterthought and by force of habit. Wheels squealed as the engine revved and within moments the car was gone in a spray of gravel, leaving behind only a residual smoke and a slight burn on the pavement.

My mouth foamed as I pulled out onto the main road amid a flurry of horns and shouts. What might I do now? It didn’t matter, I had gotten away with it; I had murdered Sara Jane. I could go anywhere I wished, now, my purpose had been fulfilled.

Her face hit the window as I made the sharp left away from her neighborhood, making who knows what dead expression against the glass. The car behind me slammed on its breaks and swerved as I cut him off suddenly, desperate to put myself as far away as possible in the limited time available. I panted, wondering just where I would go now. Not slowing as I considered, I turned right onto the steep road leading back towards the section of the city with which I was familiar.

A strange thing happened as I did so, which is to say that her head, which I noted had been pressed against the window, began to sway in my direction along the seat. It fell just across my lap so that it appeared she was resting somewhat uncomfortably athwart the front seat of my car.

I heard myself scream in that moment, the rough edges of my nerves finally registering what I had done. It was not that her fall onto me was unexpected, although it was, but more that in my weakened mental state and near complete breakdown, my ears were somehow fooled into detecting some kind of a moan or grunt registering from the point where she landed, something that seemed to indicate she may not have been dead.

The horror was short lived, for in the next moment I experienced the very real dread of feeling that my vehicle was being forced off the road. I was now at that point along the incline of the road where it had become a bridge overlooking the freeway. My car slid across the road, past the dividing line, irrevocably closer to the edge, where only a thin metal railing stood between myself and the edge of the world.

Naturally, I applied pressure to the wheel in an immediate effort to stabilize myself. The act was not involuntary, as it might have been, but rather conscious of my life and my surroundings, and furthermore I was conscious as my skin paled and my breath died in my chest, for something held me back. Glancing down, the last thing I noticed before everything became a maelstrom of grinding metal and continuous impacts was that the object that had become lodged in the steering wheel, Sara Jane’s hand, was the very thing that prevented me from holding the car onto the road.

There was not time enough to consider my options. The front of the car crashed through the barrier at 45 miles per hour, shattering the railing and launching my vehicle into that airy realm controlled by the whim of gravity, with only the hard surface of the freeway to catch me in my freefall.

Suddenly the world around me began to tumble and spin in a way it could never have been meant to. Not having an idea what else to do I tugged against my seatbelt, hoping only that I could throw myself far enough away from the crash site to at least survive; to survive, that was my only wish. But, oh, contemptuous irony, it was the body of my passenger thrown over mine that prevented my release of the constraining buckle. As impossible as it may seem, even in the random tumble and sporadic flight of objects in different directions that made natural law for that moment seem to vanish, the body of Sara Jane clung vengefully against mine as though consciously killing me, aware of my futile struggle against final death.

In gracious sympathy, what gods there were did not allow my panic to last for long. I closed my eyes, and in that darkness behind my lids I was aware of things, of leering demons and ineffable wills working directs opposed to me, as they were from the very start. I felt the weight of her body leaning across mine, pressing me down with a weight that could not have been inanimate. And, most horribly, in the silence of my memory I detected, barely perceptible, that single syllable formed by the colorless mouth of a freckled, slightly overweight, condescending adolescent girl, a bone chilling chuckle fashioned by none other than Sara Jane.

Then, all was silence.

My consciousness dived and swooped several times, pulling quickly out of peaceful lifelessness for an instant or more, and then just as quickly submerging. During one of these brief periods of wakefulness, perhaps my final, I discovered myself lying on the unknowing, hard stone, my body bent and broken, bleeding from multiple, fatal wounds at several points on my body, paralyzed and utterly beyond recovery. It was not, however, nature's will to save me from that one final torture, one final horrible visage that at once recalled and dismissed all that had brought me to this moment.

The last thing I saw before falling permanently into that endless night was Sara Jane’s body, sandwiched on top of my own and immovable, and I saw her iris, from the bottom of her socket, roll smoothly, gently, past the center of her eye, up towards the end of her sight. It was the last thing I experienced… she rolled her eyes.

Recently, C’s short story “Sara Jane” hit a bit of controversy when the person who Sara Jane was based off of found the story and indirectly contacted Zasada to have it removed. After much deliberation, we’ve decided to keep the story on the site, but not without a rationale as to why we would invite such controversy. Both C and Zasada wrote pieces defending the work and the reasons to keep it up. Click here to view them.