I looked at my brother-in-law as he lay sleeping across the other bed in the hotel room.  Not an expensive hotel room, but a useful drab and brown one.  We had stopped in for the night on our way somewhere and I couldn’t remember for that moment where that somewhere was supposed to be.  I couldn’t say why, I didn’t know, only that an urge that was overwhelming took over me when I found the tool in the bathroom.  

I watched him snoring, sprawled out over his side of the room and felt sorry that he was now single, on his own after so many years, a widower.  My sister had died and left him.  I took the hammer in my hands and stood over him.  I looked down at the back of his head, his face turned sideways and streaked with the red lines of sleep.  Suddenly, I whacked him across the head with the hammer and then drew it quickly back up again.  He groaned and his head lifted.   I whacked him again, but this time, the fork of the hammer stuck into his skull,  in his forehead.  His head went down and didn’t move.  I stood still and quiet, watching as the life slowly left his body.  I hit him again and he groaned, and then hit him again to make sure he was dead.  My brother-in-law was now my ex-brother-in-law. 

I slowly sat back on the armchair beside his bed and watched him take his last breathe.  It was visible, the body shutting down, almost shrinking back into itself.  Now why did you do it, what are you doing, what’s the matter with you?  Just whack, thud, hit, gurgle, die.  I sat back in my chair and looked at him with the hammer stuck in his forehead.  Why did I do that?

I was calm, no emotion, no feelings of panic, just an eerie calm descended over me as I looked down at him, the blood trickling down his forehead.  He was on his side, with his arms up over his head as if he were reaching for something.  To defend himself while he was asleep, I suppose, or to stop me from piercing through his forehead again with the hammer.  I looked down at him.  He died quietly, it was – a sure blow.   I packed up my stuff.  I was driving into the middle of the night, not anywhere, just away.  I had nowhere to go now. 

I gathered up the blankets from the hotel bed and wrapped them around him and picked up my suitcase and left.  I drove until I woke up later beside a river and there was a family by the water splashing around.  I was on a mattress and after a few minutes, I fell back to sleep.  I slept long and hard, and it was the best sleep I’d ever had the on the best mattress in the world.  The family talked to me and I told them that.   

Before too long I was driving again and wondering if anybody was looking for me, but no cops were on the road.  Then, many cops were around and I wondered what it would be like to be in jail.  I had some vitamins, I’d just pop them all and die if they brought me in.  I drove by the cops on the side of the road.  They were checking license plates, looking for someone it looks like.  I kept my head down and drove by and nobody seemed to be interested.  They checked the number on my plate, I saw the cop in my rearview looking at my plate, and then down at a writing pad.  What would it be like in jail?   I saw myself being confronted by other women, with hammers of their own.  Could I do a lifetime in jail?  Who would I have to fight to defend myself?’  I pulled over.