You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shopping
Carmen stands at her bedroom window. The chill of the house creeps up her legs. She flinches at each brittle clink of silverware downstairs. Peter in the kitchen, sanctimonious at the sink, rewashing the dishes she’s already done, making them shine, drying them properly, tallying each fork, each cup, each plate to use against her. Evidence of his moreness: more work, more effort, more commitment; the mores he defines as love. Once she’d believed in it.
“Why do you do things half-assed? You need to take initiative,” he’d yelled at her earlier, “but all you do is take.” Large hands splayed flat on the table, claiming the kitchen, this house, her life. He’s never hit her. “Not yet,” her sister warns. His violence is in his words, a terror that lives in her brain, her limbs, saturates the air.
Sometimes she can’t breathe. She inches her top drawer open, carefully. “I waxed the runners,” he told her when she returned from a hike with friends the previous Sunday, a hike she dared to tell him he could not join. “It’s just the girls.” She hoped he didn’t hear the desire tremble in her words. Her desire to flee. That day she stood firm. That day, he relented, though she’d been paying for it ever since. Still, it opened a door to a courage she’d thought was done with her.
The drawer no longer squeaks and for once, she is thankful for his act of proving his devotion greater than hers. She packs only her favorites from the dresser. The softest clothes, the few things that make her feel pretty, leaves behind the sagging panties, the bras with disappointed straps. She’s grown thin in the three years of their marriage. He accuses her of dieting and tries to fatten her up. Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater. It isn’t vanity that dampened her appetites.
In the bottom drawer is the framed photo she keeps hidden. Her mother. Her soft blue eyes, like Carmen’s own, fill her with grief. I want Mom. She clutches it to her belly, longing pushes at her chest, and she hears her mother’s words: “That man will eat you alive.” She saw from the start what Carmen couldn’t. Last week, her mother died. Peter refused to let her go to her, to nurse her, to be with her as she died. Now he’s scheming to keep her from the funeral.
She tucks the photo in her suitcase, closes it and sets it by the door as she’s done so many times in her dreams. In the bathroom, she closes her vanity case packed with makeup, jewelry, and vitamins. The sound is a slap that echoes off the tiled bathroom walls. She freezes.
And he is there.
In the doorway, his breathing makes a bellows of his ever-widening frame. Every pound she’s lost seems to have landed on him and tripled, as if he’d grow large enough to fill every doorway just to trap her inside. He stares out of dark eyes she’d once found alluring. Uncharacteristic uncertainty creases his brow, as if he is just realizing that the rules of the game may have changed. The game he practices for every day. He right-She wrong.
What had she expected? The usual fury? Bared teeth? Or weeping? Certainly not his silence as she inches past him. Even her bones tense, anticipating his hand, his hard grip on her arm. She avoids his eye, clutches the vanity in one hand, picks up the suitcase in the other.
She left her phone, off, in her bedside table. She has a burner, if he hasn’t found it yet, secreted under the front seat of her car—her one freedom she brought with her to the marriage—it has new tires he’d insisted on the week before because they were wearing unevenly due to her poor driving skills.
He clumps behind her down the stairs.
“What are you playing at?” He tries an amused tone to tell her she’s ridiculous.
Her spine tingles. She sets her suitcase down, rolls it slowly to the front door, sets the case on top. She can’t look at him. Can’t lose her nerve. She sucks in a tight breath. Opens the door.
She will see her mother buried.
Outside, light has given way to darkness. First snowflakes drift like confetti on her car that sits, waiting. The tank full. A motorcycle growls past her front gate that swings open and closed in the frigid wind as if beckoning her to leave. She rubs the jitters from her arms and steps to the front closet.
“What? You’re leaving?” His laugh is high, cruel. “You’d fall apart without me.”
She pulls on her coat, her hands shake as she pulls on her gloves. Grabs the vanity case as if it’s a portal to another world, another self.
He strides over and blocks the door, feet planted wide, fists on hips, like a schoolyard bully, furious at the other children for not playing the game he wins every time.
She considers running into him, plowing him down. Red Rover, Red Rover.
“You have to stay and work it out.”
She turns. “Work it out?”
“Yes. Whatever you’ve got yourself upset about.” He exhales, his flabby face expectant. “I love you.” He nods sternly. “We just need to calm you down.”
Calm me down. She tries to smile.
“I’m sorry,” she says. He has no idea how sorry. Sorry she didn’t listen to her sister, her mother, her friends. Her shoulders sag. She pulls off her right glove.
“Good. Take off your coat,” he says slowly, as if speaking to the deranged. “I’ll get you a glass of wine.”
She tries not to flinch as his meaty hand runs down her cheek. He kicks the front door shut, grabs her suitcase, and rolls it with him to the kitchen. She is frozen in place. She really thought she’d do it. The wall clock ticks. Despair fills her.
The refrigerator door slams, a drawer opens, as he lectures the kitchen on the problem with her moods.
A gust of wind blows the front door wide to reveal her car, waiting, glittering like a snow globe under the streetlight. She pictures her mother’s face.
She hears the squeak-squeak of the corkscrew as she buttons her coat, shoves her hand back into her glove, grabs her vanity case, and slips outside, eases the door closed softly behind her.
Then runs full out, heart in her throat, praying this time she’ll have the guts to do it.
That this time, she’ll beat him at his game.
Teresa Burns Gunther
Teresa is an award-winning author whose fiction and nonfiction are published widely in US and international literary journals and anthologies. Her story collection Hold Off The Night, a Finalist for the Orison and the Hudson Book Prizes, was published June 2023. Her stories have been recognized in numerous contests; most recently, her work was awarded the 2023 Gemini Short Story Prize and the 2022 New Millennium Award for Fiction. She is the founder of Lakeshore Writers Workshop where she leads workshops and offers coaching and developmental editing services.
- Web |
- More Posts(1)
