The first time I raped my wife should have been the last; I realize that. I also realize there never should have been a first time, but I’ve made peace with my… my failure, in that regard. It happened, and nothing could have stopped it; she worked too hard to turn the unspeakable into the inexorable.
But the things I’ve seen and done since? There’s no solace to be found, no excuses I can invoke to help me sleep. It’s been every three weeks for the last two years now, for Christ’s sake! A day late or early now and then, sure, but her rhythm is clear, as is her method.
It always starts with an argument.
I can’t pick out a date on the calendar, but somewhere along the way… I don’t know how, but it stopped just being her sickness. She infected me; whatever pollution runs through her veins has found its way into mine, corroding my organs and chilling my blood. I can feel it happening, no matter what the doctor says. I’m dying slowly amid the ruins of my dreams and my decency, and I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what I am.
I marvel at how she makes it happen without a hint of contrivance, how the tension between us steadily breaks down into fuel for an explosion. It feels so immediate and organic; the fight —while always a pretense— is never a formality for her. The anger and resentment that come frothing from her lips are not casual inventions; they are raw, bitter truths that sting the eyes when spat with bloody-minded precision.
It’s as if she needs my rage to make it all real. She needs me to give her self-immolation its initial spark.
She takes from me what she makes of me; I am become an impenitent fire, lit upon the oily estates of our private hell. Mine is the endless shame of absent regret, and I tremble at the knowledge of my own depravity.
In the moments before it happens, when she’s at the height of her excoriating orations, she seems possessed; possessed by something that views her world as little more than an uncomfortable skin to be shed. In my imagination—
Not not NOT my imagination! I will not concede my reality… not yet! I saw her face burn and crack and slough away! I watched her ashes float upon the still, mournful air. And when I looked up, I found someone new, glaring at me defiantly through stolen eyes. Someone dangerous, hungry, and unafraid to die. Someone who demands proof that I’m alive.
—she’s terrible to behold. Everything I’ve ever admired about her flees into the night, and I’m left alone with what little remains.
Left with the howling, alien things that slither through the swampy recesses of her corrupted consciousness like the decaying memories of predators long gone, but somehow still afoot and afield. Things that urge me toward ignition with heedless zeal. They envenom her tongue to drive me mad, and then delight within their fetid, prefrontal cave at the spectacle of violence I unleash upon her. They never tell me their names, but I know who named them.
I’ve talked to her mother about it, as much as I can. My life is no longer something to be discussed honestly, so my questions and confessions are couched in misdirection and half-truths. I sometimes suspect the old woman sees through me, but if so, she doesn’t deign to acknowledge it.
“She was always a rebellious child,” her mother once told me, exhaling a cloud of smoke while flicking the ashes of the day’s inaugural cigarette into a coffee cup. “I swear, her first word was ‘no.’ Never once did as she was told. Acted like she was better than me, like I was nothing. She never listened to anyone but him.”
I didn’t have a chance to meet my wife’s father; he passed away years before we met. But his presence lingered about his family, a sour taste on their sharp tongues. A familiar darkness clouded her mother’s expression as she spoke, staring out the window at the decaying barn her husband had raised thirty years before.
“It was all a game. Not to me, but to her. For attention, I suppose. She wanted it, and he… he obliged.” Drag, exhale, flick. “She’d push one step too far, and he’d haul her out there by her hair, any time of day or night, kicking and screaming. Out there for hours with that leather strap of his, leaving me here alone. She’d be cussing him one minute, and begging forgiveness the next. But she never called for me, even when she knew I could hear her crying. Never.
“I would have come if she’d called, you know?” She affected sincerity as she turned to me, her eyes insistent. “I swear I would have. But I was nothing to her… so she was nothing to me. That’s how it has to be sometimes, I think, between mothers and daughters. We get to be everything or nothing.”
You’re more right than you know, you fucking cow, you self-involved pustule of a person. What did you ignore? What did you accept? What did you expect? You let that— that thing you married craft a disaster from the tattered parts of your little girl, and mourned as if the loss were your own. I hate you more than I hate her, more than a I hate myself. I hate you because you had the gall to live when even he had the good sense to die.
My wife was yelling at me from the bedroom that first night, as I stood in our kitchen and stared down a bottle. She yelled for so long that I didn’t immediately notice when her shouting turned from a harangue into a hoarse summons. My resentment was simmering; I should have grabbed my coat and walked out the door, but instead I followed her call down the hall and into someone else’s nightmare.
She was waiting on her back, sprawled naked on the bed, exposing herself to me. Not arranged and posed like a seductress; she was disheveled and glaring at me in dark appraisal. She looked wild and empty, like a wounded animal that had run its last mile and turned to make a stand.
“Fuck you, Daddy,” she said, staring past me at a shadow I didn’t know I’d cast.
A lie, I tell a lie. I knew I had. I knew. It was just a secret I kept from myself, a truth I did eschew.
She rolled over, grabbed the headboard with both hands, and pulled herself to her knees. She looked over her shoulder at me, arched her spine, and leaned back as far as her arms would allow. She craned her neck to look my way and giggled darkly, rolling her hips like a besotted whore.
“Watch this, Daddy,” she said teasingly, allowing her head to loll back and her eyes to close. She was beautiful, for just a moment.
Beautiful like broken glass, like the scream of an eagle, like the dance of a man on fire.
Until she frowned, clenched her teeth, and pulled hard against the headboard, snapping her torso forward and smashing her face into the varnished oak. There was a cracking sound that nauseated me, and for a moment she remained there, every muscle taut and her face resting where it had landed; it was as if the impact had welded her in place.
When she finally moved, it was with a tremor as her shoulders relaxed, and she slowly, gingerly slid down the headboard to the plush embrace of the pillows below. She squinted at me through sodden hair with glassy eyes, until I took a step toward the bed and stirred her to focus.
“Ht,” she coughed, sending a fine spray of blood and mucus into the air. “Herr— here we are, Daddy. Where you brought us.
“You’ve been— you’ve always been so goddamned disappointing. You’re s’posed to break me, but you don’t. Fucking coward.” Cough. Spit. Sigh. “See what I have to do— do to myself, just to show you how its done?”
I could only stare.
And clench my jaw. Ball up my fists. Feel the pounding in my head.
“C’mon, Daddy.” she taunted in a quiet, vacant little voice. “Don’t you see how easy I’ve made it for you?”
“What?” I asked finally. “What?”
“Look at me,” she said. “Am I wrecked? I feel wrecked. I’ll bet— I’ll bet it’s pretty bad. Right?”
I nodded.
“I wonder if I’ll ever be pretty again? Everyone liked me because…” She drew a deep, painful breath. “’Cause I had such a nice smile. But now my mouth is full of blood instead of lies. Tastes good, but I bet the view sucks.”
I stepped toward her, wanting to help—
Wanting to fucking shake her and throttle her and make her pay…
—but she waved me away, and I stopped.
Her fingers began to gently explore the newly altered topography of her face. She traced the ruin of her nose down to her split lip, and then to the broken teeth hiding behind it.
“You do good work,” she said, as a low, rough laugh worked its way out of her throat.
“Fuck you,” I replied without thinking. It felt good. “What is wrong with you? Why are you doing this?”
“The only thing I’m doing is waiting. Ngh.” Her body shook slightly as a wave of pain swept through her. “Waiting for you to finish.
“Think about it. The neighbors heard us shouting; they’ve been hearing it for weeks. All our friends know our marriage is on the brink. Everyone will know you did this to me.”
“You stupid cunt!” I lunged toward her, and leaned in close.
Close enough to smell the blood and wonder about the taste.
“Lying fucking whore!” I hissed. “No one will believe that bullshit!”
She croaked her way through another laugh.
“Who said anything about lying?” She sat up woozily, struggling until she was kneeling before me on the bed, gazing up at me. “Fuck no. I’ll swear you never laid a hand on me.
“In fact, I’ll tell them how everything’s gone wrong, and how it’s all my fault. How I can’t stop provoking you. I don’t listen. I just— just keep moaning and whining and never shut up. Won’t drop it, ‘cause I’m a girl, and that’s what bitches do, right? We don’t let it go. Not until someone makes us. Until we remember our place.
“So you’re right, they won’t believe me. But they’ll still know you did it.”
I gripped her shoulders tightly and pulled her close.
“What is it? What do you want from me?”
She attempted a smile.
“Do what a man would do. Take it out, and hurt me with it. Make me feel the hurt. Make it so I want to feel it. Can’t you see? I haven’t been alive for so very long… don’t you even care? I hate you so much, for denying me, for making me suffer like this!
“I’m here bleeding on our bed, ready to destroy your entire world. Be a fucking man and give me what I deserve.”
So I did. And I do, every three weeks.
I am in hell.
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