Something Is Always Happening Somewhere

By Kelly McClure

Dale Travers and her wife Gina moved from their tiny apartment in Brooklyn to a newly mortgaged ranch style home in Long Beach with the hope of living there forever. When one tragic night changes everything, Dale attempts to pick up the pieces but quickly realizes that life is a dark and terrifying place without the one person who gave it any me

• Language: English
• Publisher: WolfieVibes Publications
• Release date: May 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9780578367729

Kelly McClure

Kelly McClure is a writer and editor for Salon who lives in New Orleans with her wife Lindsey, dog Dracula, and two cats, Tokyo and Rocky. Her work has been featured in Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Nylon, Vice, and elsewhere. In 2017 Budget Press published a zine anthology of her short stories titled Terrible Stories. Something Is Always Happening Somewhere is her first book.

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Kelly McClure

Something Is Always Happening Somewhere

First published by WolfieVibes Publications 2022

Copyright © 2022 by Kelly McClure

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Kelly McClure asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Kelly McClure has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.

First edition

ISBN: 978-0-578-36772-9

Cover art by Lindsey Baker

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

Find out more at reedsy.com

This book is dedicated to my mom, who taught me to love books. And also to my wife, Lindsey, who taught me how to love.

Acknowledgement

Special thanks to David Reeves for being the first to read this book, and to Lindsey Baker for designing the cover.

Chapter 1

Dale beeps open the locks of her Jeep and opens the door, flinging her purse and work tote onto the passenger seat. Situated behind the wheel, she reaches over to pull her cell phone out so she can text her wife, Gina. Always the cautious driver, she’d hate to die in a crash having Don’t eat yet. Bringing home Chinese and wine be the life-ending last words she unknowingly checks out with. She laughs to herself thinking about it, picturing the obituary that would run in the local paper following the fictional crash. She died as she lived, thinking about food and wine.

Message safely sent and responded to with her wife’s go-to, a thumbs up emoji, Dale buckles her seat belt and turns the key in the ignition, bringing the car to life with a satisfying rumble. On the short drive from the parking garage of her office building to the hole in the wall Chinese food place that they’ve helped keep in business since they moved to Long Beach six months ago, she lets her mind drift to her favorite cycle of daydreams, while also keeping a percentage of her attention focused on the road in front of her. Moving her small family - which consists, for now, of herself, Gina, and their two cats - from New York to California was the best decision she’d ever made in her still fairly young life. To only be 41 and be a home owner, happily married, and occupy a windowed office at the prestigious advertising company, Gravity & Graphite, was more than her younger self could have imagined obtaining by that age. To think that not even a year ago they were all huddled together in an extremely overpriced studio apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that, more evenings than not, offered views of various neighborhood drug deals and domestic disputes.

Pulling into the only available parking spot at the Chinese place, Dale considered leaving the car running so she could just hurry in, grab the food, and get back on the road. She thought better of it pretty quickly. Long Beach, at first blush, felt safer than New York, but it was just the sunshine and palm trees. Like how, in movies, a blonde man in shorts and a t-shirt will always seem more good than a man with dark hair in a dark suit. You had to learn when to look past the window dressing. She just bought that Jeep, using a good chunk of post-move savings to do so, and would hate to see it turned into some shifty teenager’s joy ride.

Locking up and heading in, she became drenched in fluorescent lighting so yellow, she swore she could taste salt in her spit. As though the color of the place brought to her palate what was served inside. Like how the red walls of a hot dog place sometimes made her taste ketchup, and the pink walls of an ice cream shop made her suddenly phlegmy. She paid the $10.12 for their lavish dinner, pure fried trash drizzled in Crayola goo, then made her way to the liquor store conveniently located right next door for the promised and, she would assume, highly anticipated box of wine. It pleased her to know that although her family had more money now than either of them had ever come close to before, they still had simple tastes.

* * *

Before her headlights could even fully illuminate the driveway of their newly mortgaged ranch style home, Dale could tell that something was wrong. The front door was slightly open, which Gina would never in a million years allow to happen, for fear of the cats getting out. Scanning her eyes for whatever she could see, she bundled bags, purse, and wine into one arm so she could navigate her house key, then remembered there was no need for one. Houses and cars needing keys. Muscle memory. One of those fabrics of implied safety, like a parachute, or a seat belt on a roller coaster. We’re not supposed to fall from the sky, but we’re not really supposed to be in the sky in the first place. A belt and a bar keep the feeling of danger away, not the danger itself. When that fabric is pulled from us, nothing feels more real. After spending so much of our lives avoiding terrible things, when they come, it almost feels like a relief, because we know then. We know. That we were right in suspecting that they were always out there waiting for the perfect time. Dale knew that that time, for her, was now.

Pushing open the door, she quietly set all the stuff from the car down on the entryway tile. As she did, her finger brushed against something wet and she momentarily dropped the tension. Mentally cursing the kid who bagged their dinner, figuring a lid must have come loose and created a pool of soy sauce in the bag, which was now leaking all over their clean floor. In a different lifetime. In her own lifetime of yesterday, or ten minutes ago, that would have been the case. But in this new one, it was blood on the floor. Blood in the shape of a shoe print.

Dale stood up, wiping her hand on her pants, and forced her feet to move to the back of the house. Passing the estate sale phone table in their living room ($550 dollars. Gina said she’d have paid double) she saw the decorative letter opener they kept on it, not knowing what the hell else to put on a phone table, since neither of them had had a landline since the 90s. She picked it up and clutched it in her hand so hard that the blood left her knuckles, turning them corpse white.

Gina? She called out. No answer.

Almost to the bedroom door, at the end of a minutes long walk that felt like five years, Dale could see that the light from the bedside table was on, casting a man-sized shadow along the wood floors of their hallway. As she moved, ever so slightly to try and see, something rushed towards her from inside the room. The movement caused a waft of stale beer and cigarette smoke to fill her nose.

Just let me finish, a terrible voice grunted, slamming her own bedroom door in her face.

Dale backed away quietly, but quickly, and as she did she heard a collection of noises that she will hear for the rest of her life, and probably even after. Gina, her wife, her best friend, who she’s kissed every part of and could name all the sounds from, taking a sharp intake of breath, and then crying out, just once. Their bed frame creaking now under the weight of the damage being done.

Careful not to take her eyes from the door, she maneuvered down the hallway backwards, and exited out to the yard, making her way around the back of the house to the bedroom window. Now crouching outside, she could get a clear view of the bed. Gina’s face came into partial view in nightmarish vignettes. Splayed out on her stomach on top of their bedspread, her small frame rocked forward and back violently with every thrust of the man pinned to the top of her. She was naked only from the waist down and she’d been hurt. Badly.

Gina’s eyes, when able to be seen, were dead. Her body was still alive, but she’d checked out of it a long time ago. Hopefully the minute this monster entered the house. Or at least the minute he entered her. Lost in his trance of senseless violence, the man’s face was bright red with exertion as he worked towards stealing the life of not one person, but two.

Dale realized that at some point she’d started clawing at the window, like an animal begging to come inside after being let out to pee. The man on top of her wife looked up and locked eyes with her. His mouth broke open into a possessed smile revealing small brown teeth, like pieces of gum dug out from under the bench of an old pickup truck. A string of drool rolled out of his gaping maw and hit the back of Gina’s white t-shirt. She winced and then appeared to lose consciousness, as though the tiny weight of it was what finally broke her.

The sound of something shattering clipped the invisible string between them. Dale looked down at her right hand and saw that it clutched a large chunk of landscaping brick that she must have picked up without even realizing it. She entered their bedroom, scraping past the jagged glass of the broken window pane, her eyes only focused on one thing.

The man was only just now crawling off the top of her wife, wiping himself with one of their throw pillows and discarding it to the floor. Gina wasn’t moving, still slumped over the bed.

Dale opened up a dark hidden place deep within her. Some place held on reserve for a night just like this one. A night each of us hopes will never come looking for us, hiding behind our hands, unprepared for all the ugliness that life, and the people that come with it, has to offer. And she screamed.

The deranged intruder who, unbeknownst to him, had just soiled humanity for the last time in his putrid life, laughed in as casual of a way one would while sitting at a bar with friends on a Friday night. He was still laughing when Dale connected the brick in her hand with his teeth.

She followed up the blow

Reviews for Something Is Always Happening Somewhere

[Zuky Edgar · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Marketed / tagged poorly, this is not a thriller or a suspense story. There are lots of books about grief at the moment but this one didn't do anything much for me and will quickly be forgotten unfortunately.