But given the weapon of choice, a serrated knife plucked from the kitchen silverware drawer, I should have known right away that Sarah had done the evil deed. The knife was the very same knife (we only had one large knife in the house with a serrated edge) that Sarah had pointed threatingly toward me the night that I came home drunk from Melanie’s house. Amber, in the midst of a sound sleep, would have been an easy victim even for Sarah.

Sarah had chosen to stay home with me that night rather than stay with Melanie at her house. It was one thing, I suppose, for Sarah to be apart from me until the early hours of morning, but another thing altogether to be apart from me for the entire night. The interesting verity of the matter was that despite the fact that Melanie regularly spent the night in my bed Sarah didn’t seem to have any animosity at all towards Melanie. They were the best of friends. I suppose that Melanie recognized the close relationship which Sarah and I shared and she made pains to let Sarah know that she would not interfere with our kinship; that she posed no threat to her. Melanie, unlike either Catherine or Amber, went out of her way to involve Sarah in every aspect of our relationship except for sex. Melanie welcomed her in our bed in the morning and at night before bedtime and made her the “pickle in the middle”. Melanie and I did not date. If we went to a movie Sarah came too. If we went to a restaurant so did Sarah. Melanie included her in everything we did. Amber, on the other hand, on the nights she would stop by, used every manipulation to get Sarah to go to sleep so that she could have me to herself. Sarah’s resentment of this was no secret. Sarah grew wise and she forced herself to stay awake as long as her little body would let her so as to interfere with Amber’s ambitions. Sarah would deliberately take naps (something she normally refused to do) so that she would be well rested when Amber arrived; and this tactic sometimes resulted in reducing our copulations to one per encounter depending on Sarah’s endurance and resolve.

That Friday night before Melanie left for the shelter of her home we had a miserable argument. I had just come home from work and apparently Melanie had only moments previously answered the phone when Amber called.

“Tell Mathew that I’ll be spending the whole night tonight dear.” Amber had said as though Melanie were the maid.

“Fuck you.”

“So you’ve finally come to your senses! You’re going to join us then?”

Melanie hung up the telephone as I stood across from her in the kitchen covered from head to toe in soot from a hard days work. “That was your slut!” her eyes were red with rage, “She’ll be spending the night tonight.”

“What?”

“Yes, she invited me to join the two of you. I bet you’d like that wouldn’t you?”

I walked up to her and tried to comfort her but she pushed me away, “I’m sorry. What am I supposed to do? Tell her no?”

“Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to tell her that you can’t fuck her anymore. That’s what any loving boyfriend would do.”

“Any loving boyfriend who wasn’t facing life in prison maybe!”

I stormed into the bathroom and ran my bath while I washed the grime from my hands and face while cursing under my breath. Sarah came into the bathroom and tried to hug my leg. “Ah ah! I’m covered in dirt honey. You’ll get it all over your clothes. Wait until I clean up and then we’ll hug, okay?”

“I don’t like it when you fight with

Melanie.” She looked up at me with sad eyes. “It’s okay honey. It’s just a little disagreement. We’ll be fine.”

Sarah hugged my leg despite my dirt and looked up at me with a smudged face.

“Let me get ready now, okay honey?” “Okay.”

By the time I got out of the tub Melanie had left. Her absence at dinner left me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. I would have liked to have resolved our differences before she left but I supposed that that was not possible. It was the first time we had quarreled with such conviction. I worried that she might not return. I couldn’t blame her for being angry. Amber was deliberately provoking her and I had been weak and impotent.

Sarah and I ate a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs which Melanie had prepared before I got home from work. Sarah had the table set and dinner served by the time I walked into the kitchen fresh from my bath. Sarah also had lit two white candles which she had positioned in glass candleholders molded into doves.

“Birds of peace.” I said out loud with a hint of sarcasm.

“That’s what Melanie said.” Sarah smiled at me from across the table, “Do they really bring peace?”

“Apparently not, but they look pretty.” “Why does Amber have to come over again tonight? She always ruins everything.”

I didn’t want to sour Sarah towards Amber any more than she instinctively had been predisposed since I was sure that we would have to endure her visits for the foreseeable future. “Be nice. Amber has helped us a lot more than you know. If it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t have a place to live.”

“We could live with Melanie at her house.”

“You liked living there did you?”

“Yes. Her house is pretty. Ours is ugly.”

“Well you’re just going to have to get used to our ugly house and to Amber coming to visit because we’re kinda stuck here for a while.”

“What if she dies?” “She’s not going to die.”

“I know, but if she did she wouldn’t come over anymore.”

“No I suppose not. Eat your supper. I brought home a new movie to watch tonight. It’s an old scary movie, but you have to eat your supper or you’ll miss the beginning because I’m going to put it in when Amber gets here.”

When Amber arrived she was carrying her black leather satchel filled with sex toys.

She smelled like a flower garden and she had dressed deliberately sexy in her short red skirt with a low-cut top that revealed the better part of her tanned cleavage. I was washing the dishes and Sarah was clearing the table.

“Hello lover.” She whispered more loudly than she had intended; apparently loud enough for Sarah to hear because when she said it Sarah turned her head and scowled at Amber.

We turned down the lights and sat on the couch. Amber sat close to me but Sarah climbed up and wedged herself between us.

We watched “The House on Haunted Hill” and then we watched “Psycho”. But just after Anthony Perkins was preparing to slash Janet

Leigh into a puddle of blood Sarah’s eyes began to twitter. She fought a courageous fight but her eyelids soon won the battle and she drifted off to sleep. I tucked her in on the sofa and Amber and I retired to the bedroom where, among other things, Amber tied me up and, with a strap-on prosthesis (and despite my fervent protestations while tied and gagged), anally raped me.

Afterwards Amber untied me and I curled up in the fetal position and pulled the blanket overtop of me. Amber climbed into the bed behind me, nudging me to the opposite side of the bed, and she spooned with me and cupped my breast as though I were the woman. I felt completely emasculated. When I woke up the next morning I was covered in blood and Amber was lying flat on her back next to me as cold and grey as a headstone. Her eyes were wide open as though she were staring at the spidery crack in the ceiling. Her face was splattered with a fine mist of blood as if she had caught the stray sprits from a garden hose. Her throat was ripped apart as if someone had taken a large bite out of her neck and the serrated kitchen knife with the black wooden handle was sticking straight up from her chest. How I didn’t wake up during the attack I really don’t know. Sarah must have been particularly stealth in her approach and I must have been sound asleep. I was probably in the midst of a good nightmare reliving my last sexual experience with Amber; after the abuse I had endured I was certainly exhausted enough to sleep through a cyclone. I don’t know. I only know that I woke up, my own naked body smothered in Amber’s juices, to a gruesome scene that caused me to rush to the bathroom and vomit.