The moon hung low in the sky, suspended lazily above a blanketing of clouds coming in from the west. The streets were quite deserted to the naked eye, but it was a well-known fact that no one slept on the south side of Chicago. No one dared close an eye for too long. While the north side of the city had its glamour and chic, the south side had its slums and depravity. It was hardly believable that the two very diverse halves were part of the same city, but it was apparent that anything was possible in Chicago.
It was on that evening that a single window in the small, shoddy apartment building glowed among a sea of black, lit only by the faint glow of the moon. Within that shanty-like cubicle of a home sat a woman in a rocking chair that had seen many better days and dozens of previous owners. The chair gave a very faint creak was the woman pushed it into a slight rock. An old leather-bound Bible (probably the most expensive thing in the entire apartment) was settled in her lap, broken and worm smooth by years of reading and handling.
The woman's washed out blue eyes slipped across a page that she'd read nearly a dozen times before. Her thin, bony finger slipped under the edge of the page before she turned it, carefully smoothing down the silky, tissue paper leaflet. Seeing the beginning of chapter fourteen of Ezekiel, her eyes roved upward to an old clock on the wall. It, like the chair, was broken down and nearly worthless. It had to be wound at least once a week, and the bells that were there to ring out the hour were rusty and dull, the striking hammer missing completely.
2:23 was the time. Jim was always home by 2:30. Wandering out of Ezekiel, Elizabeth thumbed back to a page in Exodus. The sheaf of paper appeared to be more worn than the rest of the pages around it. She found the verse immediately…the one she read every night before going to bed. "Ye shall not live a life of lust."
She closed the book, her emaciated hands running over the smooth leather cover. She and Jim had been living together for nearly seven years. They'd been living in sin for almost seven years, not being married. She was interested in the prospects of marriage. What woman wouldn't be? But Jim never seemed to fancy the idea. Elizabeth's eyes glazed as she stared at the candle on the floor, perched in a saucer. She had asked him several times if he would marry her, but he always dismissed the idea. "We're practically married," he'd say. "We just didn't have to pay for a weddin'."
Elizabeth's gaunt hands clenched into tight, bony fists. She uncurled one long enough to reach for the drawer on the small and ancient end table next to her. Sliding the drawer out, her fingers traced along the butt of a handgun that Jim kept. It was old, but safety, it seemed, was more important to Jim than marriage.
She grasped the gun and took it from the drawer, sliding it back into place with care. The gun she held probably cost as much as half of their small wedding would have. The thought made her angry.
She heard heavy footfalls making their way down the long hallway, and she made up her mind. She would ask him to marry her once more tonight. But it would be the last time. If he said no, she would leave. She love him more than anything, but he had been the one keeping her in the sinful life she'd been living for seven years. He wasn't a religious man, so he could care less about what the Good Book said. But she cared, Elizabeth decided.
She heard the locks rattle on the door and the small jingle of just two keys clinking together. It was him, of course. She didn't know anyone else who had only two keys to jingle together. The door opened after a moment of muffled cursing (which occurred every night at about this time. Like everything else around them, their locks were old and slightly rusted. If a robber was interested in their shoddy things, it wouldn't be a difficult task of entering) and Jim stepped in, closing the door tightly behind him.
Jim was a large man…much bigger than Elizabeth. Dropping his keys into the pocket of the torn and dirty pants he was wearing, he glanced over to where the woman sat on the chair.
"Why are you still up, Liz?" he asked, moving a few steps across the room to where they had a tiny, makeshift kitchen. He bent over the ancient icebox, looking through the two or three things inside before spotting a bit of crusty bread Liz had made several days earlier.
The chair ceased its quiet groaning as Elizabeth fell still. She watched him grab the bread and give it a testing squeeze. It was hard as rock, but he gnawed a corner off of it nonetheless, turning expectantly to her as he awaited her response.
"When are we going to get married, Jim?" she asked finally, staring intently at him through her insipid blue eyes. Her hands rubbed nervously at the cover of the Bible, awaiting his answer.
Jim stepped haughtily from the area he'd found the bread into the circle of dancing light emitted from the candle on the floor. "We've been over this how many times before, Liz?" he asked, looking at her as if she were out of her mind. As if she'd forgotten all the other times she'd begged him to get married. He took another rough bite from the chunk of bread. "I'll give ya the same answer I've given ya every time before. No, Liz. Ya hear me?" He chuckled, a bit of the half-chewed bread spraying from his mouth, the damp flecks sticking wherever the landed. "Women," he said, shaking his head and laughing aloud.
Liz's face reddened in embarrassment and anger, finding her bony hand wrapped tightly around the revolver in her lap hidden beneath the Bible. It would have been different if he would have just said no like all the times before. But this time, he'd had the audacity to laugh at her.
"I mean, wha'didja think I was gonna say, doll? 'Yes'?" He continued to chuckle. Liz jumped up, throwing the Bible off her lap. Her arm raised rigidly, her eyes afire with fury as she pulled the trigger three times, riddling Jim's chest and stomach with bullets.
He fell, then, on the floor right next to the candle on the saucer. The eerie glow that the flickering flame emitted registered an expression of shock on Jim's face.
The gun dropped from Liz's hand and she hastily kicked it under the rocker, as if doing so would hide it from the world. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled over to where Jim lay on the floor, the chill of death beginning to take him. Blood pooled around him, creating a slowly moving stream to the low point of the floor. The leisurely crimson flow had already coated the bottom of the candle's saucer and was on a direct path to the woman's old book.
Rescuing the worn leather Bible from the finger-like tributaries sliding its way, her eyes sought assurance in the open pages. It registered that what she was seeing was the Ten Commandments, though, and her washed out blue eyes glued to verse thirteen in the twentieth chapter of Exodus: "Thou shalt not murder."