13

Most memories never fade from consciousness unless they are cleaned with the wet sponge of new experience. You think you’ve erased them but still, the dust of memories long passed cloud the blackboard of your mind, a haunting backdrop that lingers almost unnoticed. Nothing wipes the slate clean like immersing yourself in the alien, the bizarre, the totally not you.
Nothing wipes the slate clean like Five Hairs.
This was too good, way too good.
It was starting to freak her out.
Sapphire could feel the red heat rushing to her high forehead. It caused her to wiggle beneath the seat belt. Nervousness took over the control panel and she started to fidget. She flipped the visor a couple of times and her right index finger flickered back and forth opening and closing the passenger window.
She glanced over at Five Hairs. He kind of looked like a monkey wanna be, like a Homo Sapien that regretted moving up the evolutionary ladder. His Mount Rushmore brow reached biblical proportions and almost obscured her view out of the driver’s side window. She looked at his hands gripping the steering wheel and even though his knuckles were bare, she surmised that it was from scraping the sidewalks of his home town as he wondered around looking for bananas.
She was freaking.
No man ever, ever did anything nice to her. They were always groping. Fat sweaty old arms forcing her to come closer, they flipped out twenty dollar bills thinking it would make everything OK. They let their warm man chowder splatter over her cheeks and let her off at the next exit. She hated them.
But Sapphire had a soft spot.
It usually was reserved for animals. Real animals, not animal like people.
She loved kittens, stray dogs and of course, the Puffin.
She decided that it was wrong to hold anything against the Homo Sapiens challenged. Five Hairs needed love and she needed to open the flood gates.
Besides, he was such a good kisser.
Her mind wondered back to some Discovery Channel show she watched where she saw chimpanzees kissing. They seemed pretty good at it and she wondered if was in his genetic makeup. Is good kissing passed down from generation to generation? From species to species?
She looked over at noticed that Five Hairs was looking back at her. His eyes held a softness that took Sapphire by surprise.
“Just three more hours and we’ll be there.”
Sapphire tucked the monkey thoughts deep into her cerebral cortex. No need to dance on anyone’s ego just yet.
“I can’t wait.” She sighed as she opened up the glove compartment and noodled its contents.

12

There was no air.
There was a lot of heat, but no ventilation.
The atmosphere in the car stiffened around her and stagnated into an unbreathable soup. She gulped against the empty, hoping to choke down a breath, but her lungs remained paralyzed and unfilled.
Panic set in and she started to flail her arms in a last ditch effort to open up her airway.
She couldn’t find any air and she tried to open the passenger window.
There was no button to make the window go down. There was just some handle that she cranked in a circle, but the window still didn’t go down.
It was so hot.
Five hairs seemed to pick up on her panic and rolled his window down. A rush of highway air swirled around the cabin and released her.
The bare skin spreading out under her skirt, from her thong across her thighs and down to her ankles, started to burn painfully and she regretted the skirt she was wearing. The cootchie cutting hem line got her the lift, but a ride might not be worth all the skin.
There she was.
The dichotomy tickled her ears slightly as it breezed by her, and she wondered if her face was shiny and flipped down the visor so she could use the little mirror.
The ride may be going in the wrong direction, but at least she was moving.
Sapphire flipped down the visor and studied the rectangular reflection tossed back at her from the tiny mirror. She hated her high forehead. It reminded her of her dad. Not that she could remember him or even pull out an old photograph to cuss at. It just wasn’t her mom’s forehead and it was the one thing she could definitely blame on him.
Her mom gave up the sad tale one day over some toasted Leggo’s and told Sapphire the story between syrupy bites and vodka sips. Sapphire got the gist of it, but the ending was a bit slurred and somewhat vague.
But it went something like this;
her dad had worked the midget wrestling circuit because he could never catch a break in Hollywood. He was too tall, according to all the casting agents, to play the traditional little people roles. But at four foot six, he couldn’t land any other part. He starved on The Strip for a bit then hooked up with this cat name Big Al.
Big Al bought him some drinks one night and told him he could make a fortune wrestling. He would be the biggest little guy East, West and North of the Pecos (He couldn’t guarantee South, because that was out of his licensed area).
Sapphire’s dad jumped at the chance and signed his name to a contract written on a cocktail napkin. He squirmed into some spandex, donned a cape and called himself The Jumbo Shrimp. A legend was born.
Not quite.
Jumbo Shrimp got his ass kicked on a nightly basis. Night after night he was swung around by his ankles and pile driven onto the mat, his face clenched against two testes and a veined sausage by the muscular thighs of a guy twice his size. Three years of this found him at the end of his rope when the tour pulled into the Hartford Civic Center.
That night he wasn’t going to take any more.
That night, when the script called for him to be scrotum squashed and hammer headed into hell, he lashed out and bit off the left nut of Kyro The Giant. Kyro grasped at his bleeding groin and fell to the canvas. Jumbo spit out the man egg, flipped off all four corners of the stadium and made a short legged dash to the eastside exit. Everyone witnessing the event was too stunned to even notice the four and a half feet off flesh and bones running away. They just wondered who won the match.
Jumbo was twenty blocks away before he stopped to catch his breath.
He stumble through a 7-11 parking lot and there was a red Honda civic with the keys in it and still running. Jumbo jumped in and sped away.
That’s when he met Sapphire’s mom.
She was on the side street next to the Dada Mart, freaking out because she had just shoplifted her first bag of Fritos. All of a sudden, this car slows down and pulls up next to her. Like from a bad dream, this midget wearing a cape opened up the passenger door and offered her a ride. Withou thinking, she hopped into the front passenger seat.
“Come with me to Vegas and I’ll make you rich!” he screamed.
Sapphire’s mom, all high from the Frito heist, acted on impulse and giggled when the midget hit the gas pedal. They sped down the side streets like they were in the chase scene from The French Connection. Not a soul was following them but he drove the car as fast as it would go onto the freeway. They must have gone a hundred miles west on Interstate 84 before she even realized what was going on.
“What the fuck!” she suddenly panicked.
She looked over at the spandex wrapped midget breathing heavily next to her.
Anxiety softened and she felt pity.
He looked so harmless, even with the cape and mask. His little legs stuck out straight over the edge of the seat.
They made it to Vegas in three days, only stopping one night in some mangy mom and pop motel off of Intestate 80, somewhere out the most desolate backwoods of Nebraska.
When they got to Vegas, Jumbo made her drive around town for a while until he finally barked at her to pull into some creepy motel that was clinging onto a fading philandering salesman clientele, far from the jingling slots and electric neon sunshine. He said he would be right back and climbed over the wooden fence behind the car. Sapphire’s mom waited for almost three hours before she gave up and made the long lonely haul back to Connecticut.
It was even lonelier when she gave birth to a baby girl and her parents not only refused to come but made it clear they would hate anyone that did.
Mormons suck that way.
Mom married the man she always knew as her dad because her parents made her.
Sapphire hated her mom for making her put up with that touchy creep just because she thought he was her father.
She hated her fake dad for being a loser creep.
Sapphire had to get away.
She just had to.
That’s why she did.
Sapphire hated her high forehead.
She hated her real dad.
She hated the fact that she had been conceived in Nebraska.
She wondered if she had any midget in her.

35 years

Thirty Five Years

Another night of the same old same old, just rolling on down a well grooved rut. Sure, I was bored as hell, but I was comfortable. Isn’t that what every man really wants? Stop fighting the world and find a little peace and quiet, a small corner where you don’t have to slip into your bravado and pretend to be a giant. I was out of the mainstream, content to sit on the bank and watch other men, younger and more foolish than me, swim against the current. Yes, I missed that entire hullabaloo now and then, but those pangs softened as I wiggled comfortably into my wrinkles. Life was slowing down to an old mans pace, but time wasn’t. I could see the end of the road. I didn’t mind any delay in the inevitable.

I had led a good life.

I was a good man, for the most part, or at least I hoped so. I fathered four children and three of them lived to have families of their own. My eldest has four kids and he even named one after me. My daughter married the right guy on her second try and has a girl. Liam, my youngest, adopted a girl from Vietnam with his partner Andrew. It took them almost five years, but we were all there at the airport when she arrived. My second son, Johnny, don’t ask me why he got my name and even my eldest didn’t, Johnny died in the Middle East when a roadside bomb blew up under the Humvee he was in. He lived almost two days after that and I still cry over the pain he went through, but he was proud to be a soldier and I guess that makes it O.K. in some peoples book. I don’t know about that. He died a hero and was willing to make the sacrifice he did, but that didn’t make it O.K.

His death was cataclysmic, like a meteor crashing down and ushering in a whole new era on my personal planet.

The entire thing beat me down pretty hard. I lost my faith in God and stopped going to church every Sunday with my wife. I hated everything and everyone. I hated my country for sending my boy over to some war we should have never have been in, in the first place. I wanted answers to questions that had no answers. I hated the politicians that tried to fill up the hole in my life with clichés and sound bites. I hated the well wishers that kept coming up to me saying how sorry they were and that they knew how bad I must feel. I hated all of it. The whole world just made me angry. I wrapped myself in that anger and never noticed how that anger shoved everyone out of my life, everyone, my friends, my children and even my wife.

Yes, even my wife.

My wife had always been a saint. She was smarter than Einstein, could always make me laugh and she was more beautiful than a sunset in paradise. The kicker was. She had a heart big enough to love a loser stiff like me.

We had a great marriage. Sure, we hit a couple of bumps along the way, but we always were partners. She was my best friend from the day I met her and I shared all the highlights of my life with her. I loved her more than anything and she loved me. We were the missing pieces to each others puzzle. We made it work.

Neither of us saw it coming.

Thirty five years of love crumbled under six months of my anger. She listened when I ranted over dinner and embarrassed her at parties. She brought the hundreds of angry letters I wrote to the post office. She even packed me a lunch when I went to my first demonstration. But, when I started leaving for weeks on end to march in every protest around the country she put her foot down. She asked me to stop.

“Let it go,” she begged me, “HE would never have wanted this. I don’t want this.”

I didn’t listen. I quit my job two years before retirement and I spent almost a year screaming at every anti-war gathering around the country. I used up almost every penny my wife and I had saved over the years. I was hell bent on doing something, anything. I was just so mad and wanted the whole world to know about it.

Then one day I wasn’t mad any more and I went home.

My wife was still there but we weren’t best friends anymore. We barely even spoke. I moved into the den and settled in with all my books and a fold out couch. She still made me dinner every night and we made pleasantries about the grandchildren and the weather but we never talked about anything real. At least we didn’t until tonight.

Tonight, as she handed me a platter of asparagus, she nonchalantly announced, “While you were off on your rampage I slept with Keith Miller. I did it for two months. It’s over. I just thought you should know.”

The air around me stiffened like cement. I was frozen in befuddled anger. Keith was another teacher at the college she taught at. Years ago, I was so jealous of his good looks and Irish accent, not to mention how much he had in common with my wife and the amount of time he spent with her. It took a long time and quite a few fights, but I ended up being secure in their relationship and had even become friends with Keith. He was even the Godfather of my son Johnny.

I glared at my wife. She just looked back at me steadily and soft. I could see the passionate plea for understanding in her eyes and almost opened up. I slammed my vision shut with fire and pushed away from the table in disgust. Tossing my napkin behind me, I stomped off into the exile of my den. I splashed into my leather easy boy with an angry thud.

I stewed in silence; occasionally wriggling in disgust as I thought about another mans fingers caressing my wife as she moaned in ecstasy. I even punched at the air once or twice in a vain effort to stop what had already happened. I was sick to the core of my being and sank into a deep sulk. The steady tick from the grandfather clock behind me lulled me into a groggy stupor.

Time floated over me unnoticed and I drifted out of my body, unaware of my moment.

I could hear her footsteps tracing my earlier stomp down the hall. She paused in the doorway then made her way over to what used to be her chair, before I stopped recognizing her as my wife.

“I think we should talk some more.” She said and sat down. “We need to work this out.”

I stared down into my book. I had lost myself in the blur of words swirling around the page in magnified print an hour ago. If she had come in and quizzed me, I couldn’t even have told her the author or title of the book I was reading, let alone the plot. It was like all the others I had pulled off the shelves for the past ten years. The books, the den, they were just an escape. Now there was no escape. My worst nightmare was sitting calmly in the chair in front of me, reciting the story of how she ripped my heart out and left it to rot with all the maggoty real life shit she helped me to forget over all these years.

“I was lonely.” She started to explain “You were changing into a different person. You became someone I didn’t know, a person I didn’t like.”

I looked at her face and it softened with an overture of forgiveness.

For a moment I saw the beautiful young girl that grabbed hold of my heart so many years ago. I reached out and cupped her face in my hands. I remembered how we swirled around in joyous circles of love to our favorite song on our wedding day. I remembered holding her hand and the painful joy of her smile after she gave birth to all our children. I felt the comfort of so many years being with the other half of my soul.

Then I felt the black of all that disappearing. I felt the desperation of loneliness and the emptiness of hate. I felt a lifetime of love slipping away from my infuriated grasp.

I leaned forward and kissed her.

She was startled by the tenderness. Her blue eyes looked up into mine, sparkling at first, then faded pale as she saw the man she once loved was lost forever.

She smiled one last time.

I slid my hand down around her throat and pushed my thumb against her larynx until it snapped. She kicked her legs out straight in a helpless struggle but put up almost no resistance at all, like she was accepting her fate. She let go of her life and her body slackened into the chair. I pushed harder, like my anger commanded it. I didn’t relax until I felt her skin grow cold against my face.

I pushed my self up and looked down on her lifeless frame.

Her eyes were still staring back at me with gaping black pupils and filling me with shame. I reached out and pushed her eyelids down.

I pulled a hankie out of my pocket to mop the sweat off my forehead. Swirling around like a child on a playground, I tried desperately to find the person that killed my wife, but found no one but the demons calling me to Hell. I screamed into nothing and wasted my prayers for forgiveness.

I made my way out to the corridor, grabbed the phone and dialed a familiar number.

“Hello.” The voice answered on the other end

“It’s over you bastard. Now neither of us can have her.” I spit into the receiver.

“John? Is that you? Oh God! What have you done? Karen just wanted to get your attention. Oh Jesus! Tell me you didn’t do anything stupid. John? John”

I clicked down on the phone.

I went back into the den and opened up the drawer to my desk. I reached inside then went back out into the corridor and picked up the phone to make one more call.

“Hello, Police” was the answer on the other end.

“Come to 133 C_____ Boulevard. There has been a murder suicide,”

I dropped the phone and raised the revolver to my head.