Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Wendy's Promise Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

WENDY’S PROMISE

Long before she ever heard the pleas or the moaning, she smelled him. His sweat, his piss, his shit, his bedsores, his scent revolted her senses, but she kept a level head about it all.

They were her own words, the words that trapped her forever. Things were so different back when she’d promised, times were different and people were different. Sure, lots of girls jump in the sack with any old boy and the first time she asked Isaac, she expected him to say whatever it took to get her to open her thighs. In reality, she just wanted to be wanted, she was only sixteen and that was more than twenty years ago.

“Wendy,” the voice said from the bedroom, so weak and ruined. He’d stretched the E and held it. “Weeendeee, please,” his voice hummed a reprise. Sometimes, she had to ignore him. She put the cans of creamed vegetables into the cupboard over the sink, next to the cans of soup and cans of meat. Everything was a puree. It was easier on Isaac’s insides. “Weeendeee.”

She closed her eyes and leaned against the counter, kicking her foot on the lower cupboard where she kept the drain cleaner, wire scrubbers, and the garbage can. The idea was there again and it wasn’t the first time. She just couldn’t do it.

“Weeendeee, I’m so hungry. Weeendeee, I think I pooped again.”

Yeah, no doubt, he pooped, shit the goddamn bed, but he couldn’t help it. This life was thanks to that drunk. He’d crossed the line. He was broke, drove without insurance and walked from the hospital into police custody with little more than a scratch while Isaac would never walk again, never gain full motion in his arms, and never see life from a completely vertical angle. His stew of innards had to stay at a very particular angle or the tubes fell and the result of whichever bodily function from whichever tube found a home on the sheets.

He’d been moving again, she could smell it.

“Wendy, please.”

For eighteen long years, it was always Wendy, please or Weeendeee, please, give or take the length of the vowel hold.

Will you love me forever, no matter what? Will you love me even if I get fat and ugly? Will you love me even if I become a vegetable? Will you love me always? She’d asked him over and over, it was a game, a game a thousand young lovebirds play, but a scare brought the question under a new and grim light.

It was the kind of thing that happened somewhere in the world, but never at home, never where you stood. Buildings collapse on the news and it’s always so sad, but it’s never really scary you until the people around you scatter and the world comes down.

Wendy and three friends drove south to a Barenaked Ladies concert in Toronto. The show was great fun, The Ladies were in their prime back then.

Wendy drank too much before the concert and needed some water on the way home. An especially blustery winter night, the trip home took significantly longer than the trip down. Looking back, she wished she’d noticed all the snow on the roof. Later reports suggested that the owner, a very recent immigrant from a snowless Asian patch of civilization, knew nothing about clearing a roof. He bought a building and opened a Becker’s Milk, easy peasy, bring on the eighty-hour weeks and the thirty-grand a year income.

An inquest happened after the dust settled and the snow cleared.

Wendy and her friend Becki had gone inside while Robin stayed out to keep the car warm. Wendy went for the fridge and Becki had to check her 649 ticket. Wendy had a habit of reaching to the back for everything: milk, bread, fruits, veggies, whatever else, water included. She opened the windowed fridge door and leaned in to get a tall jug of clear gold  from deep inside. That’s when the ceiling creaked, she didn’t hear it over the hum of the compressor, but Becki and Jim—real name Yun Geun-yong—stopped where they were and looked around. It was obviously a bad news kind of sound, but that’s as far as either had a chance to think before the roof collapsed.

Becki and the man with Jim on his nametag both died. The sturdy frame of the fridge saved Wendy. She had a broken ankle and by comparison was lucky, like catching a cough in a leper colony.

The following morning Isaac got the call and raced beyond the road-closed signs and through the drifting banks. Wendy was fine, but she was all panic and little rationality.

“Promise me, promise me,” she demanded, hand in hand with her long-term boyfriend, three years is a big deal, or was in the nineties.

“Okay, I promise. I’m just so happy you made—”

“You promise what. I want you to say it.”

“Okay, I promise to love you forever, no matter what, even if you get fat, even if you become a vegetable. I will love you always, Wendy.” Isaac meant it, every syllable, he meant it.

They kissed and held each other for a long time. Three months later, Wendy limped up the aisle in front of family and friends. Her father walked by her side, having a tougher go than she had. She’d never seen him again. He died the day Wendy and Isaac returned from their honeymoon in Mexico. A sad day lining, but he’d been sick ever since her mother died. The cancer was pretty well everywhere in his body and where it wasn’t, it had road maps ready and vacation time booked.

The promise became a regular thing, but it was fun again, the gravity ceased importance...

“Weeendeee.”

…until the accident. They’d had three glorious years, on their way to four, and then forever. Like a dream. Every day Isaac went off to brick homes, and schools, and businesses while three and a half days a week, Wendy answered the phone at John Diefenbaker High.

Come the weekend they went somewhere new or special. Two nights a week, Isaac and Wendy went out for burgers, or pizza or ice cream. Life was perfect.

That one Friday morning changed everything. Phil Unger was out all night. He’d started the night eating ten-cent wings and drinking watered-down beer served by the jug. He bumped into an old school chum from way back when, Malcolm.

Malcolm drove a forklift in the ice cream plant and Phil shovelled grain at the Co-Op mill, both had Fridays off and neither saw a reason to call it a night when the bartender stopped serving them as Malcolm lived only a few concessions over, had a stash of primo coke, so long as Phil knew some primo honeys.

The coke wasn’t primo, but neither were the honeys. They snorted and danced the night away, both letting the women pick which she preferred—one man’s ditch-pig is another man’s honey and don’t you forget it.

Phil left a little after five in the morning, head in a hazy gaze. He weaved to and fro over the yellow line on the empty highway, driving thirty kilometers beyond his turn before he realized and had to turn back.

Right then, Isaac kissed his sleeping wife’s forehead, took his lunch pail out to his truck, and headed toward the site. The local bigwig masonry company fell behind on work for the new hospital and in order to keep the second half of the contract, they had to meet every time constraint. Killhammer Construction, the company for whom Isaac worked, stepped in to claim the enticing opportunity. Isaac made it thirteen kilometers from his home, nine kilometers from where he stopped to grab a coffee, and six kilometers from the work site when he met Phil Unger on the highway. Considering the little things, the things that could’ve changed an outcome along a timeline…Wendy could only weep. If he didn’t stop for coffee. If he’d slept in. If the original company hadn’t fucked up their contract.

“Weeendeee, I’m so hungry. Weendeee,” Isaac moaned helplessly. “You promised, Weeendeee.”

The accident was so long ago, the last time she spoke the promise, even longer. She couldn’t do it anymore. Tears flowed and she decided it was time, but not the drain cleaner, that was cruelty, to both of them. She couldn’t do that. When her father died, she inherited everything he had, it all stayed in a storage unit out of town; he had guns. They were illegal, so she never touched them aside from packing them away.

She went to the grocery store, detoured on her way home. Cold and heavy in her palm. When she was just a girl, her father showed her how to load it, showed her how to fire. She walked toward the moan and the stink, the gun behind her back.

The door creaked open and every time she looked at his pale white skin littered with bedsores and sickly veins, she saw herself, the years she’d spent watching over him, watching time suck the vitality from her skin. His deterioration was a mirror.

“Weeendeee.”

She stepped closer, the smell bringing about more tears. She wanted to cover her face and run, but the time was now. “I’m sorry Isaac, I can’t do it anymore.” She raised the gun.

“Weeendeee, you promised, Weeendeee, pleeease. I love you, Weeendeee,” he said, three weak tears sprouting from his dry sockets. He attempted to lift his arms, but it had been so long since he could do anything but lay there, aging into a mass of anti-bacterial cream and bedsheets. “Weeendee, I looove yooou. Weeendeee.”

“I’m so sorry. I love you too.” She planted the gun against his forehead.

“Weeendeee, you promised, Weeen—” His voice went no further and the pistol rang out.

She squeezed over and over. “I know, I know,” she said as she unloaded eight shots into her husband’s head. Looking down at the mess made it all real and she backed away. She slammed the door and continued moving away, dropping the gun to the floor as she hit the kitchen table.

“Weeendeee,” she heard, it was light but there. She tugged at her hair, pulling bunches out by the roots.

“No, no, no, you’re dead,” she pleaded. The gun had to do it. She’d tried everything else. After the first few weeks of him home, she tried a pillow on his face, but it only knocked him out.

“Weeendeee.”

She promised herself she wouldn’t try again. He would go on his own time. She promised him. Five years later, he still hadn’t gone and he’d drained her body and soul right along with his, she fed him rat poison. There was silence for three days and then...

“Weeendeee.”

Those three days he didn’t speak were utter hell. She’d still needed him and didn’t know it, so when he did finally call she was relieved.

“Weeendeee.”

Over the following years, she’d sliced his wrists, fed him drain cleaner, and tied a rope around his throat, but he wouldn’t go. The gun had to do it.

But he was still alive.

“Weeendeee,” Isaac called out again and again until she answered.

“Hold your horses. I’m coming.” She started the blender and dumped in veggies, cranberries, and a quarter can of Spam. “Just be patient!”

—

The Hornbeck family owned the bungalow next door and knew nothing of their neighbors, but when Royce heard those shots, he became mighty curious in a hurry. He dialed the police. Being a small town, they gave him the run around about how it wasn’t likely gunshots, fire crackers maybe, and if it was gunshots, it was probably a hunter outside town somewhere. Royce was adamant and thirteen minutes later—following a best of seven Rock, Paper, Scissors series to decide who got to go—a cruiser pulled into Wendy and Isaac’s driveway.

Wendy heard the knocked on the door and stopped feeding Isaac the puree. “I think we have a visitor.”

“I hope I’m decent enough to entertain,” Isaac said, his voice a gargle, but he was smiling.

“You have an excuse, what about me?” Wendy ran her hands down a grubby apron over faded jeans and a faded sweater. She threw off the apron and raced to the door, but before she left the room, she sprayed Lysol air freshener. It promised to kill the bacteria, not just mask the smell.

She opened the door and was surprised to see two massive men on her porch. “Can I help you?”

One of the officers looked past Wendy and saw the pistol on the floor. That weapon was his first good action in months and he pulled the paper-light woman from the doorway and threw her onto the grass.

“What the hell, Bobby?”

Bobby looked to his partner, Oggy. “Got a piece!”

Oggy, given name Augustus, looked through the door and saw the gun. He entered and checked the kitchen, living room and bathroom before he came to the closed door at the end of the hallway.

From the lawn, Wendy recalled the gun and recalled its illegal status, she’d watched enough Law & Order to know to keep her mouth shut, so that’s what she did.

Oggy raced back to the doorway. “Bobby, you gotta see this shit.”

Bobby smiled despite Oggy’s sickly appearance. Oggy pointed toward the room at the end of the hall and stepped back outside, put a hand on Wendy’s shoulder.

With the bedroom door open the scent flooded onto everything, Lysol couldn’t compete. Even outside, the smell was almost unbearable. Bobby covered his nose and continued. From the doorway, he saw what appeared to be the outline of a body, covered in rotting baby food, mouldy, fuzzy blue mixed with anti-bacterial cream. He fought a retch and tore away.

“You take her in and I’ll watch the door. Call in everybody, that shit is not right,” Bobby said.

Oggy nodded.

Wendy couldn’t help it, needing a lawyer be damned. “Who’ll watch Isaac? I promised him. I promised.”

XX