Page 54 of The Quiet Tenant

He turns to you, as if waiting for you to answer the same question. All an act. All for her benefit.

You nod, too.

He brings his attention back to his daughter.

“Why don’t you go to your room for a bit?”

She says okay, scampers without a look back. She has done what she could.

Upstairs, the door to Cecilia’s room shuts.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper. “It’s like she said, she thought she saw something and she got scared and—”

“Shut up.”

“I’m sorry,” you tell him, and again: “I’m so sorry.”

He does not hear you.

“What the fuck did you do?”

His hands are on you. Grabbing you, shaking you. Before him, you didn’t know—never fully grasped the concept, the devastating simplicity of someone with more physical strength than you. You had never been reduced to nothing by another person’s clenched fists. Never had your shoulders shaken so hard you could feel the whiplash take hold of your neck in real time.

“It was a misunderstanding,” you say. “I was only trying to—”

“I said shut up.”

He nudges you against the wall, silent, deadly.

If you could, you would run up to your bedroom like Cecilia. You would disappear from his life, allow him to forget you for a moment. But you can’t, because the room belongs to him and the world belongs to him, and he wants you gone but he also wants you here, right here, where he can see you.

His arm digs into your throat. Pushes and pushes and pushes until black dots start dancing in front of your eyes.

He has done this before, but he has always let go at the last moment. This time, he doesn’t.

You cannot breathe. It’s like you never knew how. You try and try and try but the walls of your trachea have collapsed and nothing can pass through.

Alarming sounds come out of you. Gurgles. Attempts at whining. Last-moment sounds. Dying sounds.

Ten seconds. You heard that on a podcast one time. You have ten seconds until you lose consciousness. Until your body slips away from you forever and you lose any chance to save it.

You do not ask your arms to move, nor your legs. They just do it. You do not understand until you feel his grasp loosen, ever so briefly.

You hear yourself gasp before you can feel the air, finally, clearing your windpipe. You cough. You choke. You take another breath.

You are so focused on bringing yourself back to life that you forget, for a second or so, that he is here.

He reminds you.

You pushed him away, just now. You fought back, just a little. And he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit.

He finds you again. An arm around your waist, a hand on your mouth and nose. Silencing your cough. Stealing the air from you once more.

“Shut the fuck up,” he whispers in your ear. He is behind you, his full weight on your back. “Just shut. The fuck. Up.”

All this man wants, all this man has ever wanted, is for you to stop talking. To stop moving. He just wants you to stop.

Rule number four of staying alive outside the shed:

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