Stalemate

I hear you rumbling in the kitchen drawer, looking for a spoon I suppose.  It is 5:47 a.m., and you will eat cereal and drink coffee.  Like you have done for the past twenty-three years.

I shuffle out of the room in the bathrobe your mom gave me two Christmases ago.  I watch you, but you are blind to me.  It’s against routine for me to be out here.  I should be in the shower, I should be putting makeup on. 

Instead, I long to see you.  I want you to look at me, smile, and pull me onto your lap.  I want to taste the coffee where your lips have touched, I want to look into your eyes and see the man I love.  He disappeared, like coins that slip between the couch cushions. 

I take a cup out of the cupboard and pour some coffee, no cream.  You don’t notice me until I sit across the table from you and you have to move your feet off the bottom rung of my chair.

“What’s wrong?” you ask, and your amber eyes float over the Times.  You don’t mean it in the way I mean it.  You suppose our daughter has a fever or the tire has gone flat.  I shake my head ever so slightly and you go back to your paper.

I sip.  The coffee is warm and comforting, unlike our conversation.  The table between us feels like a continent.  No matter how far I stretch, I can’t reach you.  I sit across from you, feeling so much.  But when I put my emotions to words, the sentiment is lost in translation. 

The window above the sink is open, and a September breeze ruffles the hair on my arms.  I clear my throat, trying to get the courage to speak.  I won these tickets, I want to say, to Florida. Miami actually. 

My tongue hangs limp in my mouth and I feel its weight against my teeth.  I cannot speak and you cannot listen, so I guess we are at an impasse.

I leave the kitchen and do what I am supposed to do, take my shower and put my makeup on.  I hear you calling goodbye to me before the door closes and I refuse to cry.  It will ruin my mascara. 

I look stunning in a tailored shirt, the color of our pool lit up at night.  I’m not beautiful, I know; but somehow I manage to be stunning.  My face is seasoned with freckles and my lips are always on the verge of opening.  My eyes are a color the crayon companies haven’t created yet, somewhere between Outer Space and Midnight Blue.

I pick up my phone and send a text.  Next thing I know, I’m on a plane.  First class, direct flight to Miami.  I smile at the man sitting next to me.  He’s married, I know.  He proudly sports his ring and I have seen their wedding picture next to the bed.  He reaches over and takes my hand and I snuggle into the crook of his arm.  When I close my eyes, I can pretend this is my husband, my lover, the man my husband can never be.  As I doze, I wonder.  When exactly did he slip through the cushions?

The Possibilities

“She dove into the ocean for them.”   That’s what I said when they asked for an explanation.  The cop looked at me like I was fresh. 

“You kidding, kid?” he asked.  I just shook my head, waiting for him to speak again so I could watch his upper lip shiver under his moustache.  

Instead, he just licked his front teeth, top first, then the bottom.  I imagined his tongue probing the cracks and crevices, just like him.  Searching for forgotten details, for relics of what had been there earlier.  It would be rough and brusque, like him, coarse like the sand we stood on and slippery like the ocean behind us.

He turned and moved along the beach without so much as a good-bye or thank-you.  I couldn’t help staring at his feet as the sand filtered beneath his shoes, slowing his progress. 

In the end, the ocean lured me back.  Salty fingers gripped my face and the waves sighed in my ears.  I longed to see my shadow lengthen into the water, piercing the foam but always above the darkness that frightened me.

I stood at the brim, just close enough to tempt the water to caress my toes, and raised my hands above my head.  Palms together, I stretched my arms toward heaven, a profane promise that I never intended to fulfill. 

I would never dive in.  I couldn’t lose myself out there in the deep, like she did.  Maybe it was my fear that cemented me to sanity.  Maybe I was rooted too firmly to the ground to let go and drift freely on the whim of the waves. 

Sometimes, when I stand at the edge of the water, I see her face reflected in the ocean.  I hear her laugh drift along the coast and she whispers to me.  “Let go,” she says.  But her voice is hollow and I don’t trust it any more. 

I can still clearly remember her right before she disappeared forever.  The breeze behind her lifted her hair toward the water and toward the sky.  “I have to go,” she said so softly, I wasn’t sure if she had really spoken at all.  But when I looked in her eyes, I knew.  They were the color of the ocean already.  Her heart was already a thousand miles on the waves; she was only still standing there to say good-bye to me. 

“Wait!”  I called out.

She turned and her liquid eyes almost melted me.  She was the moon and she was pulling me with her, so I had to look away. 

“What’s out there?”  I asked.  It was more like a wail, a distraction, something to keep her there for just a moment longer.

She raised her hands into a point like a prism over her head and her voice rang clear across the water.  “My dreams,” she said.  And she dove into the ocean for them.

Preventive Justice

Jaclyn stood there hating herself for a long time.  Fresh, pink skin was growing like tiger stripes on her wrists and baby soft roots pushed through her scalp beneath crispy locks stained Black Licorice.  Even her eyebrow ring was slowly being rejected, as if her body wanted to flip itself inside-out and start all over again. 

She held a fillet knife in her hand, compliments of the kitchen drawer, and it sneered at her as she contemplated the feathers that still floated in the air.  She had been practicing.

Now maybe that particular knife wasn’t ideal, she admitted. The metal was flexible and the point wobbled a little bit if you really tried to stick it in something stiff, like a headboard, but no matter.  She was going to use that knife because she wanted to say she had “filleted the perv” when she told her story to the press and to the other inmates. 

She hid the knife under the only pillow she hadn’t shredded.  He would “visit” her that night, for sure.  Just like he did every time her mom was gone.  He would stumble in with his bottle of Crown, set it on the stand next to her bed, and berate her for all the things she did wrong, for being a teenage burden. 

The feathers and the scarred bed-frame would really tick him off.  He would tell her to pay penance for her bad behavior.  But tonight, she decided she would be the one playing God.  The knife in her hand sent a surge of power through her every time she held it.  And, she had been practicing.

Night came and she curled up onto her bed, never shutting her eyes.  Cars passed on the street below, their headlights dancing like strobes through her curtainless window as they came and went.  A little after 2:00 a.m., he arrived.  He was definitely drunk, because it took him forever to insert the key into the front door and succeed in unlocking it.

She listened with rapt attention as he shut the door and trudged up the stairs.  Her heart beat uber-fast and her breathing came in hard, short spurts.  Fight or flight, she knew it was referred to.  She could taste the adrenaline fill her mouth—a taste like rusted metal.

When he came near her door, she stopped breathing all together.  She was waiting for him to turn the knob, and when he didn’t, confusion immobilized her.  She heard his huge feet shuffling down the hall away from her room.  Then, they stopped and she imagined him turning a knob she couldn’t hear.  Then, it hit her.  “Jamie!” she whispered.

She placed the pads of her feet on the ground and grabbed the knife.  Silently, she crept out of her room and down the hall to her brother’s room.  Her father had left the door open and didn’t hear a sound as she edged up behind him. 

He sat at the foot of Jamie’s bed, watching the little boy sleep.  Jaclyn’s eyes narrowed.  Her grip on the knife tightened, as did her resolve.  The guilty would die before the innocent would suffer.  After all, tonight she was playing God and she would make the rules fair the way she saw them. 

In one swift motion, she carved a smile into his neck.  A thin, red line that vomited life.  He hit the floor hard, and his head thunked like a bowling ball. 

She cradled Jamie and jumped over the pool of blood that slicked the ground.  He never woke up or opened his eyes, even when she buckled him in the back seat of the car.  She drove straight to the police station and carried him in.

“This child is needs to be in protective custody,” she announced as she walked in, laying him on the sofa.  “My name is Jaclyn Spencer.  I’m sixteen years old.”  As she said this, she knelt on the ground before a speechless office and tucked her arms behind her back wrists together. 

She smiled.  “My name is Jaclyn Spencer, and I filleted the perv.”