Dismembered

Letta woke up in a frenzy. She discovered that her husband was sleeping beside her. He was drunk. Always drunk.

                        As a victim of domestic violence, she still loved her husband, because in the middle of the turmoil, there's still the belief that there may be a chance that the other may redeem himself and go back to be what he once was. But it is a futile hope, in most of the cases. Statistics show that a good 98.56% of abussive men stay the way they are, a 1.2% stabilize themselves emotionally after the first incident which may or may not involucrate the police, and only a 0.24% actually modify their behavior with therapy. Of that 98.56%, a good 96% is capable of things so sinister in their nature, that only thinking about that can scare the beejezzus out anybody. Women statistics are something altogether different, and still is the same thing.

                        96% of the women victims of domestic violence are mothers. Only a 4% are not. Apart from that, 97.69% of all women married are abused by their husbands. From that cypher, a good 78% are abused physically, emotionally, economically and sexually, while a 12% is abused only physically and emotionally, and a 10% is abused only physically. Ultrage comes in a 55%, and 64% of the times it is done with a knife, while in 24% it is done with a broken crystal bottle. In the remaining 12% it is done with a variety of instruments of torture: scalpels, garden scissors, regular scissors, forks, spoons, car keys, plastic straws, etc., the list is endless.

                        About reactions, only 22% of the women abused react the way they should. They leave their husbands, or they go to the police looking for a warrant. Only 22%. And most of them are not mothers. Letta was. Nevertheless, she also came from a very scattered 0.35% of the women abused who took justice in their hands...

                        It happened that day, when she woke up in a frenzy. Last week, her husband cercenated her two wrists, cut them off their roots with a machete. Her children saw that. They screamed. They cried. They shouted to their father. He broke the nose of one of them. He tossed the girl to the wall. And Letta had no hands to fight.

                        What is this strange, rather odd feeling people get about being dismembered? Is it the fear of being incomplete? Or is it a primal terror of becoming ugly? Maybe the scary thing is bleeding to death. Or it could be, perhaps a fear that things will no longer be the same. Actually, nobody can be the same after being dismembered. Letta knew this, for when her husband cut off her two hands with the clean slash of a machete, she remembered a man in the newspapers who was the victim of a serial killer, but survived to tell the tale. The assassin kidnapped him, took off his fingerpoints, slashed off his biceps and calves, cut off a foot, an ear, an eye and the tip of his nose. He was found before the final blow, the killer being sentenced to death penalty. The man looked like a monster come out from a Fangoria magazine. The mirror would be a constant reminder of the blood splashed in his face. She looked at her wrists and was grateful that they were cut clean, and not sawed or left hanging in the air attached to some ligament. She would remember forever the blood splashed in her face, and the way the life kept escaping her. Then, there was a decision to be made. Would she run away with her hands held with her bloody wrists against her breasts, to a hospital where they could reattach them? Or would she stay there, trying to appease her husband, so her kids would not be further harmed?

                        There was nothing she could do about the kids, she decided. Indeed, it was true, for without hands she could not do a single thing. But she screamed. And screamed louder. Nobody went to her aid. Statistics also show that from the collective total of domestic violence cases 97% of them could have been avoided if neighbors would have called the police.

                        So she kept running and eventually somebody say her cut off wrists, took her to the hospital in his car, and called the police. After both her hands were sewed back, she dropped the charges against her husband. For this decision, the goverment agency of Social Services, took her two children reasoning that she was not being protective of herself, neither of them. But that was not the case. She was still waiting for redemption to come to him. So she waited. And waited. And would have died waiting, while in the meantime, recovering from a nightmare she had the last week, in which both her hands were cut off by her husband. She knew it was a nightmare, for she did not have any scars. But the pain was there, and her hands did not move the same way. And the blood was still in her face. But there are no goddamned scars... Then, she went to see her babies, her two kids, and when she oppened the doors to both of their rooms, they were not there. But his husband was.

                        And that's when she woke up in a frenzy, took the same knife his husband used in the nightmare last week, and cut off his penis in a single blow, remembering the pain of having been dismembered. She took the thing out of the house, and fed it to the dogs.