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than usual in the middle. She’d seen
him smile once or twice at least in their twenty years together, but
Janie didn’t remember her husband having so many teeth.
    He jumped at her.
    He came so fast she might as well have had her eyes closed. One
second he was standing there grinning, showing off those teeth —
the next, he was on top of her, and she was back on the floor. He
punched and punched. Lying now on the floor with the sky turning
black before her eyes, Janie remembered him hitting her in the
stomach, in the ribs, a bad hit to her neck, and then, when she put
her wrist up to block him, he bit —
    And that was all.
    “Ow,” muttered Janie. She brought her hand up to her head,
touched it to a crusted-over gash above her ear, and took it away
again. She didn’t remember getting that one. Must’ve happened
after the neck punch and the bite; in that whole time Janie couldn’t
remember when the sky had gone from blue to black.
    Janie put the hand underneath her, and pushed herself upright.
She was scared that she wouldn’t be able to stand up, and she was
a bit dizzy at first. But she shut her eyes and counted to three, and
when she opened them again she felt better. She got to her feet and
looked around her.
    The pages from the story magazine she’d ripped were still on the
floor. Some of them had blood on them. There was a lot of blood on
the floor where her head had been. The front door from the porch
was closed. The floor lamp by the big window had fallen over. When
Janie went to pick it up, she looked out and saw that the waves were
so big they washed clear over the top of the dock. There was no boat
at the dock. So Ernie was gone.
    Janie looked at the floor where her head had been, and although
she knew it would hurt, she touched the cut over her ear. The cut was
shaped like a crescent, and had scabbed over it felt like. Janie knew
better than to pick at it. She looked outside again.
    Mr. Swayze’s island wasn’t very big — it didn’t have room on it
for more than his lodge, a shed for the gas generator and one dock
for a motorboat. That was all Mr. Swayze needed, though. He liked
to come out here to write his stories these days, and like he told
them both when he gave them the keys last month, too much room
is distracting.
    Ernie was gone. He had given her a beating for no good reason
and now he was gone. It didn’t figure.
    Somewhere outside, something fell over with a clang and a bong.
It was probably a drum, one of the open ones that didn’t seem to
do nothing but collect rainwater by the side of the lodge. When she
had met Mr. Swayze and they learned that he was a writer of scary
stories, Ernie had said, “I guess you want a horror story, can’t find
nothing scarier than that acid rain. Kill a whole lake full of fish with
just a drop. There’s your horror story.”
    “That’s pretty scary all right,” Mr. Swayze had agreed. “I’ll have
to put it in my notebook.”
    Maybe the rainwater gave Mr. Swayze ideas for his acid rain story.
Well, now it had fallen down and was spilt out everywhere and no
good to nobody. Janie opened the front door and stepped outside.
    The wind felt good on her — it was cold, colder than it had a right
to be for early September, and it cooled her cuts and bruises like an
ice pack. When she turned to face it, however, it took her breath
away, so she moved with her back to the wind, down to the dock.
    “Ernie!” She cupped her hands around her mouth, and called
off across the waters. “Ernie! Come on back! I ain’t dead! You got
nothing to fear!”
    For surely, thought Janie, that was what had happened. She
had fallen down into her blood, and there had been so much of it,
and she had been out like a light, and poor Ernie had thought the
worst — that he’d killed her.
    So he’d run. The OPP had already come by the house two times,
on account of complaints from neighbours, and each time they
asked Janie if he’d been