The big what if--would he have gone there anyway? I guess that’s something nobody will ever know, perhaps not even him as we so often tend to start believing the excuses, or better ways in which we paint our part in carrying out illicit affairs. That is, when we’ve led someone else, even if that someone else is supposedly the One whom we pledged our allegiances to hold dear, in any situation, just not when we don’t want,
t (w) o, and that is when we tell ourselves, No! Not after that particular special somebody forced me into maniacal behavior after their Jekyll-act that went against all nature, or rather what I wanted, hisses a wolfish Hyde.
So, again, would he have gone there anyway, climbed the stairs at the old Saint Mary’s Hospital, Owen’s Adair Apartments for the aging and disabled, affordable access if you count the slow elevator and tripping over the line of half broken canes, the poor lighting down dingy hallways. She, Mary, had a TV party and Brenda too was invited and who knows what kind of shenanigans each woman, or evading man had planned, but the drama began before the monstrous morning that I’d cornered him by firing rhetorical questions about how whether or not his eating all of the peanut-butter and farm fresh eggs without replacing any was part of our original rent deal? Yeah, I know, big deal, what if, so what, but I do need my protein in the morning and I have to dig out the natural butter and separated oil with a rubber spatula and mix it in my Kitchenaid to make is spreadable, and believe me, it’s no joke how hard it is to find the chicken farmer home even with two fives in my hand!
Restless from exhaustion, everyone was wakeful by the second night. Rather than talk, agree to lay out the receipts I’d given him, see now that he was working, how much he might be able to up his contribution at least to the grocery bill, but I suppose he’d seen only my mouth opening and closing and the way in which my eyes burned laser red, my incisors bared very much like a she-wolf in the way I spat my righteous anger. And, so even though I’d called several times later that day to apologize, begged him home, he’d shut himself off to me, went to her house for all-night tea.
You could say I was backed into a corner, a raccoon with a pitch fork about its neck doing all an animal can in situations when fighting for simple survival. Instead, of releasing an unfair holding of me, he took the duffle bags out with an I’ll-show-you demeanor, one of them the hand-me-down I’d gotten from my cousin Audrey, and neatly, without saying a word, packed his clothes, taken from the space I’d made in the bureau drawers and his side of the closet less than three months before. I should have known, he came for a reason, but probably not because I was the reason, I was a benefit and there was also the fact that his family and friends were snickering at him while sloshing their high-balls and eating deviled eggs and spiced nuts from their giant, granite counter-topped, great-room kitchens, Detroit Ford CEO’s, and he worked where? The video store!?
Well, I’m not the only one who showed my bite, as she suddenly bared her teeth too, her mouth moving and him not hearing again, just as I’d seen, and as with locked up anger, she wasn’t the kind to take a fork to the neck without setting back to kill with her nonstop, blogging obsession, a two-plus-years hashtag metoo rendition of that night, her being pinned down, just after I’d tried to pin him down to what had been a fiscally, slippery-fished plan when all I needed was something financially solid that wouldn’t gut-hook me.
Well, by this second night he was rubber-lipping Mary, the Finnish-blonde on a red couch and rubbing his penis through his pants, all over her, begging her to let him move in, telling her he’d be so happy if only he could live like a stretched octopus under her dining-room table. They spent an entire night, or into the wee hours of the morning, reviewing what a blind bitch I am, a child bride, a Mormon, a bucking bronco she’d reported he’d said, and one who laid out disease in my claim to his grandmother’s laundry wrack, or his decades old, two-door Honda Civic, because I couldn’t tell you anything other than his twofaced mouth that he brought to my table?
She took him to court, Meals on Wheels, a foil and Styro-foamed snack, because as a big-boned vegetarian she’s got whopping calamari to fry and ladies like me shouldn’t be left with mere kibble!
Note: This is a three part, weekend freewrite. The bold words are the prompts and you can participate too by going to 
Photo: Philipp Pilz/unsplash
