To Be Kate

“I just want to leave,” I told him. His breath smelled of liquor, and his skin shone with a thin film of sweat beneath the uniform of the royal guard. He wouldn’t let me pass. His thick arms blocked the way, his meaty hands clutching either side of the gate. The air was cold, but I felt his heat as if a sun were pressed between us like a flower flattened between the pages of an old book.
“You always want to leave, Kate. You left me didn’t you?” He laughed, a harsh sound that was red and orange like rust, a sound that barely veiled his still aching wounds. Who was Kate? I wanted to pull away, to find another exit out of this maze. I just wanted to leave. I just wanted to go home, to walk along the roadway until I found the familiar carriage that would take me home. I almost hoped that Garret would come looking after me, and tell this confused man to let me pass. But I didn’t want Garret to come, I didn’t want to face him, and Im sure he didn’t want to see me either. He would never forgive me now. Not even Garret could withstand the mortification of my act. For a moment my mind stalled, the fact that he had asked me to marry him still skipping over the surface of my head like a flat rock over a calm lake. I tried not to imagine his face as he watched me run. As he said those words, will you marry me, in front of everyone, and his face as I turned and left without an utterance in return. What would people say?—for a moment I was worried about that, about what the media would say. But then the image of Garret, so excruciatingly perfect in his suit flashed across my mind and I recoiled from the sting.
Why did I run? The answer came immediately; I didn’t want to marry him. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with him. It was fun, being dressed like a doll and pampered, bought everything I desired, and paraded around on his arm. I felt like queen, like someone worthy of that attention, but a lifetime of face value and image seemed so daunting. So tiring. I was losing myself, and I needed to preserve this tiny piece I had left before I let it drift off into the wind.
Another surge of guilt, of panic, of remorse and confusion flowed into me like a tidal wave, making the urge to run again unbearable. I felt claustrophobic, like the trimmed hedges around me were suddenly becoming monsters that would swallow me whole. I needed to leave. I needed to get out. To run.
The intoxicated man shoved me back as I attempted to push my way franticly around him. Everything that was happening, that had happened, made my eyes sting with frustrated tears. I stumbled back clumsily as his weight slammed into me, the sound of a splintering glass bottle filled my ears in the moonlit darkness. I blinked up at the guard, staggered between the two posts of the small courtyard archway, the rushing water of the river, and the dark stone shape of the footbridge just beyond my inebriated obstacle.
His silhouette made the drunken man seem more threatening; the cracked glass of his whiskey broken like eggshells on the ground glinted in the pale light sharply.
“I wont let you get away this time. No, no, no.” The stranger bumbled sloppily, moving forward like an unstable child. I backed away, the weight of my heart too heavy to think or move fast enough. I was almost in a dreamlike state, where things were too terrible to even comprehend. My mind was still reeling from my earlier shock, my head still spinning with how much I would, had, hurt Garret by leaving, preoccupied by what he was doing now, what he was feeling.
I was unfocused and confused; the man was also confused and aching over a broken romance. He imagined my face as his lovers, and I became the unknowing enemy when in the reality of the dark night I was a forest animal escaping the flames.
“You took everything,” He seethed loudly, approaching faster, stumbling straighter until he was too close for me to react. His face contorted with a demented pain, with a phantom vision he had. I was Kate to him—in that moment—his undoing. My mind went blank, and in a moment of calm insanity before my emotions came storming over my only small untouched paradise island left, I wondered who Kate was. What she looked like, and what she was doing, what she did and if I just recreated her own mistake with Garret.
Then my heart hammered like a frightened bird, and for a moment I thought it might escape the brass cage within my chest and fly away with wings spread open and free. But the unsteady beat continued, and I felt as if I had swallowed a rock, my throat closed and became solid as the sweaty man’s grip pinched the skin of my wrists.
Only when I realized I could not see my attacker did I register that my eyelids were squeezed shut. He wasn’t moving against me, but I could hear and feel the warm humidity of his stale breath. He was there.
My back was pressed against the monster hedges, the confining wall that held me captive within their greenery. I sunk in as the guard leaned on me drunkenly, and it occurred slowly that I should fight back. But then I looked into his eyes, the eyes of a lonely desperate man as he stared at a slender scare on my neck with a vacant hurt expression. I held my breath, pretended I was drowning under the storming seas of the southlands, because drowning closer to home was better than being here above the surface and breathing.
“Kate,” the man moaned with such a heart breaking desperation, and I inhaled sharply as he buried his hot nose into my neck. His skin was slick and slimy against my own, and I began in a distant, separate piece of me that was no longer a part of my body, I began to compare this lonely man’s touch to Garrets, with his soft yet calloused skin, and gentle caress.
I left my body and thought of baby Sandra, my sister of two who I had yet to meet. Of my mothers soft face, softened with the years of hard work and grief but still ever smiling. Of my father, who brought sun into the darkest of places. And of my brother, off fighting in the west, trained to protect his kingdom.
The man’s hand wrapped around my throat, gently, it didn’t hurt, but I could feel the potential, the tenseness of his muscles and knew he could. For a moment the air was knocked out of me, fear strangled away the blood from my veins and my head felt faint and weak.
“You took everything.” He muttered, the stubble of his face rubbing my neck raw, the softness and hopelessness in his voice switched dramatically, until his words sounded as if they were ground out of his mouth in the form of gravel. Sharp and ugly. “You took Janey and Matt, my children, our children.” He growled and his saliva spewed onto my face, the darkness glinted of his sweaty face as he applied more pressure to my throat. “Im going to kill you Kate.” His voice was suddenly soft again, as if he were pleading with me to understand. His voice was loving but his words were at war with his tone.
My heart seized, pressed against the dark thorny wall that cut against my skin, a drunken man telling me Im going to die, the night pressing down upon me, the moon and stars turning away, betraying me, and Garret. In a panicked moment before the insane, delusional stranger shoved me to the unforgiving ground I imagined his face before me, instead of this man, I imagined last summer where we stood beneath the archway and he pressed his glass-smooth lips against my own, and my heart hammered so much I thought it would escape. I imagined last summer when we crossed that bridge, just meters away from me now, we made it across.
Never would I make it across that bridge again. I fought, I struggled and punched and kicked and thrashed until I was bleeding from every exposed surface of my skin. I fought until my dress was in tatters, drugged with mud and blood. But I was no match. Women were supposed to be soft, to small and gentle. He was burly, a trained guard, soldier, stronger, angrier, with passion on his side. I fought more for the idea of fighting rather than the idea of escape.
He had me pinned down, and I realized after my tearful struggle that he was crying. Rocking back and forth on top of me, burying his face in my hair as he sobbed.
“Im sorry Katie, love. Im so sorry. But you make me hurt. And I want you gone.” I understood, in a panicked frozen state. I understood he wanted his heart break to leave. And since Kate was the reason he was hurting, if she disappeared so did his pain. I couldn’t find it in myself to blame this delirious man, or this Kate for what was happening.
But as he blubbered drunkenly, and the stench of stale alcohol filled my senses, I reached behind, feeling blindly with my free hand until I found a rock. I shark pointed heavy rock. I held it tight, and looked into the eyes of the hopeless, drunken man about to and willing to commit murder. Panic and fear and numbness engulfed me like an all powerful black hole. It consumed me, and for a moment I was sucked into three different visions. Three different outcomes. The first was at the ball, at that ridiculous party, where Garret asked me to marry him. I imagined myself saying yes, I imagined his smile, burning so bright and beautiful like the sun, it hurt to look at. He would kiss me, and I would beam at him, and the world below would boom with applause. His parents would look at each other from their stone encrusted seats and would accept my small town heritage into their family, and accept their sons happiness.
But that ending flew away like a fleeing bird the moment I ran myself. The second was this rock I held in my hand. I imagined myself bashing in the skull of this deranged man, of hitting him and screaming and thrashing madly to get away and then in the panic and fear in the moment doing something I could never handle. When I would come to my senses I would find the man dead beside me, his drunken mouth slack and gaping, his eyes wide and glassy, as blood streamed down his temple and pooled on the sandy ground. I would cry and break down, I would not be able to cope with that. With stealing someone’s life, with killing this man. I couldn’t do it.
I let the rock drop.
And then the third was the last option left. Where I would die. This man would choke me, strangle me, slit my throat, throw my in the river. I would be gone. His ghost would be too. His Kate would be dead, sinking within the fogginess of peace. Of death.
So I stared up into the eyes of the man who would be my killer, because his face told me that he would. His words told me he would. Whatever Kate did, she deserved to die in his books, and I would die, and I would play the role of his Kate.
My heart was raw, like all my insides had been washed up along the coast after spending years beating against the sandy shore. I felt hollow and cold and sad. Sadness overwhelmed me, like hurricane it swept through me and left me empty. A shell.
I don’t believe in the face of death anyone can come to peace with something so vast, so unknown and unimaginable. Death is not anything I could comprehend. It would always be scary. Coming to terms with not existing is impossible. So I didn’t. Instead I reviewed the living, the warmth of life as the blackness engulfed me. The gravel pressed itself painfully into my back, the crushing weight and stench of the unhinged stranger and the feel of his slimy lips, like slugs against my lips. The imprisoning walls of fragrant greenery that imprisoned me like solid walls and the moonlight washing over me light a sad, cleansing song. And then the bubbling water of the river, of the some bridge I would never cross. And in my last moments of life, I thought of Garret. And in the distance, as I inhaled my last breath, before my eyes became glass mirrors of emptiness, I thought I heard him calling my name somewhere within the maze of green walls.