Almost Every Time
A Short Story by Abram Dress
“You killed me,” she said, every time. Her face always shadowed, the bedroom always dim.
The apartment, once a hotel, converted decades before, was small and unclean. During the day it was dingy, dim enough that he got headaches if he tried to read or watch TV. At night, it wasn’t really dark, just differently dim. Cheap blinds hung over the single stained window. They let in enough light to reveal the outline of the girl standing at the foot of his bed. The small light on the nightstand near his bed was always off. Sometimes the power was off. Sometimes the light bulb was burnt out. Sometimes the switch was off.
Every time, there was no light from the lamp when she was there.
“I didn’t mean to,” he usually said. Or “Fuck you. Go away.”
His breath smelled of bottom shelf gin on the days before the VA check came. It smelled of decent scotch on the day or two after the VA check came, or after he had cashed the occasional paycheck from that month’s short-lived part-time job. Sometimes it smelled of toothpaste. Usually it didn’t.
She always stepped forward. Just a step. Enough that the piss-yellow stream of streetlamp light fell on her face. It was a pretty face, a little dirty from playing in the dusty street, but always with an underlying joy and innocence. Sometimes it was unmarred by blood. Sometimes the dusty face held a childish smile that made his eyes damp. Sometimes the smile was not there. Sometimes there were tears then.
But there were always tears later.
“I was alive, then you killed me,” she usually said. There was always blood on her face when she said that. The other times she said “You should play with me!” She was always smiling then.
“I can't,” he always said, and then sometimes he said “deal with this” and sometimes he said “play with you.”
Always “I can't.”
She always looked at the floor. Sometimes there was a soccer ball there. Sometimes there was a pool of blood there. Usually there was both. Then she looked back up at him.
There were always tears on her face then. Tear streaks turned the dust on her face into tiny muddy rivers. Almost every time, her dusty dress had bullet holes in it. But in the dark the bullet holes were never as obvious as the tears on her goddamn face. Maybe they were always there.
She stared at him. He stared back, arching his neck. The single pillow didn’t hold his head up high enough. It gave him cricks in the neck every night. He always planned to buy a new one the next day. Sometimes a car pulled into the parking lot, lights blazing through the cheap blinds. Then the shadows in the room elongated and the girl’s face became clear before fading into the shadows. His eyes would briefly need to readjust to the dim and he could not see her face very well for a moment.
Sometimes he needed that.
“What the fuck do you want?” he usually said. “What do you want?” he sometimes said, or “What can I do?”
She never responded right away.
He always kicked off the sheets then and flung his feet to the floor and leaned forward, head in hands. He always shivered. He didn’t have a blanket on the bed.
Sometimes it was cold in the room and he thought he should buy a blanket. Sometimes he planned to buy a new blanket the next day, when he went to buy the new pillow.
Sometimes it was hot in the room, so hot that the sheets were sweat-soaked and he could smell the gin or scotch sweating from his pores.
The cold nights were better. The smell was better. Sometimes there was frost on the window, but the little girl always had sweat glistening in her hair as though she had been playing outside on a hot day.
“They loved me,” she said, every time. He always looked up then, at her face that sometimes had blood on it and always had tears on it. Usually there were both when he looked.
The pill bottle on the bedstand was often on its side and sometimes it was standing up. It was always uncapped. Sometimes it was empty, but there was always another. Sometimes the pills were prescription. Sometimes they were commercial.
Every time, the pills didn’t really work. Not well enough.
He always picked up two of them or one of them or three of them and popped them in his mouth. There was a glass of water on the nightstand that almost always had a film on the top as though it had been sitting there, untouched, for many days. Sometimes it was fresh water on the days he had promised himself he would be better, but it was always untouched.
He washed the pills down with a swig from the bottle that was always uncapped or uncorked next to the untouched water glass.
“Why are you here,” he sometimes said. Or “You don't even know how to speak English. You're in my head, aren't you?” Or he took another swig from the bottle. He put his head back in his hands and looked at the dusty floor.
Almost every time he knew, at some level, that the girl was only in his head. That she wasn’t real. Just memories that he could, if he was strong enough, control. Almost every time he knew that he could make her go away, somehow..
Sometimes the bottles would make the girl go away for a little while. Usually she stood there and cried, quiet. She never made a sound and he wasn’t sure if she was still there for a few moments. If she was gone, all he heard was the traffic outside the window. If she wasn’t gone, all he could hear was the traffic outside the window and the screaming inside his own head. Sometimes the screaming was the girl. Sometimes the screaming was him. Sometimes the screaming was a teething baby. Sometimes the screaming was a grown woman.
The girl stared at him and he stared back, scratching his hand. His left hand bled a bit as he displaced a scab. The scab covered scar tissue. The scar tissue covered, but did not completely hide, the tattoo. He’d once been so proud of it, but now no amount of scratching and cutting would get rid of it.
He held up his hand and watched the blood drip down into the crevice in his palm, trickle down fingers. It pooled around the gold band on his ring finger.
“You made me this way, you know?” He said, not looking at her but instead at the hand. His unit number was visible under the blood. The logo, a skull with a flag behind it, was mostly just scar and scab. Every time he chuckled, or sobbed. “But I guess I fucking made you the way you are too.”
She didn’t respond. She didn’t talk much.
Sometimes he stood and walked towards a bookshelf. It was mostly empty, but there was a picture there. A smiling woman held a chuckling little girl. They must have been having a tickle fight. They must have been happy. He hadn’t been there when the picture was taken. He couldn’t remember seeing smiles like that on his wife and daughter’s faces since…
His ex-wife’s face. Sometimes that “ex” part didn’t sink in right away.
He remembered smiles on their faces when he first came home. Smiles and tears, happiness and relief tempered with nervous energy. He was in his dress uniform when he stepped off the plane and he saw his wife’s face within the crowd. They embraced as his daughter hugged her mother’s leg.
He remembered hugging his daughter as she smiled and tried to figure out who this man was that was embracing her. She knew the word “daddy” but it didn’t have the same meaning to her as it did to other children.
“You murdered me.” She said. Every time.
He slammed the picture down and spun around.
“Fuck you!”
The girl that stared at him could have been the same age as his daughter, probably a bit older or a bit younger or a lot younger. The hair and skin were different, darker. The clothes were different, but not much. The young, quizzical look was the same. Behind her dark eyes he saw the same wonderment for life that he saw in his own daughter’s eyes. And the pain in her eyes was the same pain he’d seen in his daughter’s eyes the day he left for the last time.
The bullet holes in her chest were different. His daughter didn’t have those.
He always picked up the phone then. It was too late but he dialed the numbers. Sometimes it was a local number, then it was a long distance number. Usually there was no answer, but rarely there was an answer. His wife’s voice. His ex-wife’s voice. Tired and angry. “Don’t call again.” Then there was a dial tone. But sometimes, very rarely, so rarely it hurt, it was a girl, a little girl or a teenage girl or a young woman.
“She doesn’t love you anymore. You ruined everything.” That voice was not from the phone, it was from the shadowy girl, and he flipped her the finger while he listened to the phone. Those few times the little girl teenager young woman answered the voice was wonderful as it said “Hi Daddy” or “Hey dad” or “Dad, it’s way late.”
“You’re just pissing her off.” He waved his middle finger at the bullet-riddled walking corpse and whispered into the phone, “Hi sweetie. How are you doing?”
Sometimes she would talk, sometimes she was busy. Either way, her voice went away too fast and he was left alone holding a dead phone and holding a flaccid middle finger pointed at the girl he’d killed. “I miss you,” he would say into the dead phone, Every time. He said it regardless of who answered, how long they talked, if they even talked.
“They don’t miss you.”
“You’re cruel,” he said. “You’re a mean little shitty kid.”
“Says the guy that shot me…” she stuck a finger into one of the holes in her chest “one…”, she stuck it in another hole, slightly lower in center of mass, “two…”
“Yes, six times. I thought you were a danger.”
“I was kicking a soccer ball, asshole.”
He shrugged. “It was a dangerous place and your family probably killed my friends.”
“My family never did anything, and I never did anything,” she said sometimes. Or she said “Yes, most of my family was with the insurgents. We killed a lot of your friends.” Either way, he didn’t believe her. Either way he knew he should not have, or he should have, done what he did.
“I should kill you now,” she said. She always said it and he always opened the drawer on the nightstand. His fingers settled comfortably on the 9mm pistol that was the only thing in the apartment that was well maintained.
She always stepped towards him. He always stood, holding the pistol aimed center of mass. Sometimes it was tense as he glared and she pouted. Usually they both laughed. “How many more holes would I have to shoot into you to kill you?”
She chuckled. “I’m sure one or two more would do it.” She always stepped closer. “You’re not needed, you know.”
He always nodded, he always lowered the pistol. “Probably not.”
“You probably don’t need to be alive.”
“Probably not,” he said, looking longingly down the shadowy tunnel of the pistol barrel.
She always vanished then, gone until another night.
Almost every time he put the pistol back in the nightstand.
Almost every time he chose to live another night.
Almost.
–END
Author’s Note: It’s a story for Memorial Day. That’s enough.
Copyright 2025 Abram Dress