Although bent toward matrimony before she discovered her gravidity, they announced the pregnancy and the marriage jointly. Their distress over the timing of the two events thrust them into a protracted delay of the announcements compounded by their increasing inability to achieve honest communication. It was at this point he felt what would become a familiar compression. A stifling change in the air he breathed. At times, it would grow so thick and solid, he felt as if he were chewing his way through it.
It was the presence of the child that came closest to breaking him for good, snapping what she considered his final sinew of rebellion against their destiny together. During the first weeks of their daughter’s arrival, the sight of her never failed to pump tears from his eyes. The infant carried the heaviest weight with which she would ever be yoked. He wanted the totality of the child’s attention. His frustration with the natural pace of her development wrung him like a rag and wound him like a spring. He wanted her eyes to focus. He wanted her brow to betray some curiosity. He wanted her to speak.
Partly because of his wife’s contradictory cries for both the monetary means to hold the home together and the staggering emotional attention she required to keep their family intact, he found himself engaged in the constant escape provided by his trio of jobs. The first, an informal security detail at a local school from 7am to 4pm daily, he had held long before he and his wife ever met. The second drew him deeper into the sphere of adolescent delinquency three days a week, 6pm to 6am, as a “team member” at the county Juvenile Detention Center. As a third job, he took to landscaping on the weekends. This endeavor rewarded him the highest dividends in both money and peace of mind.
Sleep would attack him as if it were the huge shadow of a cat. No matter how well he thought he had prepared a safe path from one job to another from one meal to the next from this room to that one, the panthery shade found him and consumed him and he never fought it with any success. Outclassed and outgunned, he learned to knuckle under the cat’s warmth in mid pounce. It was a defeat he embraced and it too became another means of escape. The recharging of the meat in his mind and his body that he needed so badly so hourly was seen as a benign bonus in the dark shallow freedom of sleep.
Meanwhile, a silent violence began to fill the space where he left her. She could taste blood all the time. Every waking hour when the child would cry and he wasn’t there to see her sacrifice, she would weep and shake while trying to force the appropriate parts of her body to churn food. But her metabolism was weak. Her biology couldn’t find the fortitude to make the minimal production quotas. There were managerial decisions early on pertaining to the cost/benefit of producing that much food for a parasite to whom her body thought it had completed its obligations. She was unaware these deliberations had ever taken place. She couldn’t keep her scattered thoughts wrapped around any concept for an effective stretch so the remaining cellular faculty rose to the task. Albeit a cold and heartless result.
On more than one occasion, he found her standing motionless above the baby’s crib, clutching pillows or cords or wads of the child’s clothes. He watched as the things in her hands collected death in the angles and curves of her grasp. He couldn’t sense her fighting any urge to act but rather waiting for this urge to slither a slimy path from the cogs and chains of her brain to re-emerge in the electric servos of her fingertips. Allison? he asked. His dry voice was by this time a stranger in this bleak room with walls so dim and touched by the glow of the alley lights across the backyard. Yes? Are you okay? Okay? Are you okay? I’m fine, Marcus, why do you ask?
He wondered as the panther gathered around him how many times she stood over him at night with an altogether different arsenal of weapons. A collection made of harder things than batting or nylon. They were sharp or heavy or both. She could read the time on the lighted alarm clock in their silvery reflections. And they could no doubt collect and store a shit-ton more potential death than any pillow, he thought. However, if he feared her capabilities, either in respect to himself or his daughter, it wasn’t a fear sufficient to cause him any further concern than the fleeting imaginings of her glassy eyes and trembling lips poised above him in the dark.
It was the presence of the child that came closest to breaking him for good, snapping what she considered his final sinew of rebellion against their destiny together. During the first weeks of their daughter’s arrival, the sight of her never failed to pump tears from his eyes. The infant carried the heaviest weight with which she would ever be yoked. He wanted the totality of the child’s attention. His frustration with the natural pace of her development wrung him like a rag and wound him like a spring. He wanted her eyes to focus. He wanted her brow to betray some curiosity. He wanted her to speak.
Partly because of his wife’s contradictory cries for both the monetary means to hold the home together and the staggering emotional attention she required to keep their family intact, he found himself engaged in the constant escape provided by his trio of jobs. The first, an informal security detail at a local school from 7am to 4pm daily, he had held long before he and his wife ever met. The second drew him deeper into the sphere of adolescent delinquency three days a week, 6pm to 6am, as a “team member” at the county Juvenile Detention Center. As a third job, he took to landscaping on the weekends. This endeavor rewarded him the highest dividends in both money and peace of mind.
Sleep would attack him as if it were the huge shadow of a cat. No matter how well he thought he had prepared a safe path from one job to another from one meal to the next from this room to that one, the panthery shade found him and consumed him and he never fought it with any success. Outclassed and outgunned, he learned to knuckle under the cat’s warmth in mid pounce. It was a defeat he embraced and it too became another means of escape. The recharging of the meat in his mind and his body that he needed so badly so hourly was seen as a benign bonus in the dark shallow freedom of sleep.
Meanwhile, a silent violence began to fill the space where he left her. She could taste blood all the time. Every waking hour when the child would cry and he wasn’t there to see her sacrifice, she would weep and shake while trying to force the appropriate parts of her body to churn food. But her metabolism was weak. Her biology couldn’t find the fortitude to make the minimal production quotas. There were managerial decisions early on pertaining to the cost/benefit of producing that much food for a parasite to whom her body thought it had completed its obligations. She was unaware these deliberations had ever taken place. She couldn’t keep her scattered thoughts wrapped around any concept for an effective stretch so the remaining cellular faculty rose to the task. Albeit a cold and heartless result.
On more than one occasion, he found her standing motionless above the baby’s crib, clutching pillows or cords or wads of the child’s clothes. He watched as the things in her hands collected death in the angles and curves of her grasp. He couldn’t sense her fighting any urge to act but rather waiting for this urge to slither a slimy path from the cogs and chains of her brain to re-emerge in the electric servos of her fingertips. Allison? he asked. His dry voice was by this time a stranger in this bleak room with walls so dim and touched by the glow of the alley lights across the backyard. Yes? Are you okay? Okay? Are you okay? I’m fine, Marcus, why do you ask?
He wondered as the panther gathered around him how many times she stood over him at night with an altogether different arsenal of weapons. A collection made of harder things than batting or nylon. They were sharp or heavy or both. She could read the time on the lighted alarm clock in their silvery reflections. And they could no doubt collect and store a shit-ton more potential death than any pillow, he thought. However, if he feared her capabilities, either in respect to himself or his daughter, it wasn’t a fear sufficient to cause him any further concern than the fleeting imaginings of her glassy eyes and trembling lips poised above him in the dark.
Edit 11.2.2018