life is a dance with the reaper

My hands shook as I pulled the rat poison from underneath the sink. We lived out in the boonies and needed to discourage outside pests from moving wholly into the house, or just under it. I’d had the stuff in the kitchen years before thinking to use it for an alternate purpose. Alternate purpose, how clinical and cold I’d become toward him, his life and the taking of it. Actually come to think of it, not so alternate actually, to kill a pets either way.

The opened salt shaker was on the counter, and the brown glass bottle sat unopened on the counter for a bit as I stared at it. I bit my lip, hard, and could not feel it. I was rigid and frozen in time and space until his voice rang out for another beer, followed by the universal greeting of the human pig,an enormous billowy belch. Thank God I was far enough away not to have to smell it.

The extended sigh seemed to loosen my muscles up enough to get moving again, and I unscrewed the lid.

“Where is my fuckin” beer?”

I could hear him stand up and move toward the kitchen. Christ I was good as dog meat, or look as if mauled by dogs. So much of a regular occurrence was his violence toward me, that before he was in striking distance, I was already concocting the story to tell the neighbours, or anyone I might run into.

Then, silence, followed by some gurgling sounds and a crash hard enough to shake the house’s foundation. I stood silently and motionless for the second time with the opened bottle of rat poison in my hand. What to do next.

I screwed the jar lid back on, and taking my sweet time put it away and got him his beer. Either way he would beat me, even if he was just stopped now by his fall. There wasn’t a sound from the other room. So, brazenly I pulled out a chair and sat, having a sip of his beer.

Now that was something I had never done before. Normally I would just simply jump up get his beer and within seconds have him sucking it down. After my second sip I felt a sense of curiosity come over me, as he had not made any sounds at all. So, taking the beer with me I walked to the living room, and there sprawled out like a gutted carp was my hubby of over twenty five years. Motionless. Again I sat down. I sat down on his chair in a strangely necessary act of defiance. Another sip of beer passed, and another. I had stared at him awhile now and could not see his carcass move up and down as you would expect from a man still alive. Dared I hope? Not wanting to be disappointed just yet I waited another minute, but there was not change. I put down the beer and slowly crept toward him.

The past few weeks seem like a blur in someone else’s life. I am still living in the fog of disbelief. That at long last I am fully free, that I get. I feel it in every cell of my being. Very slowly I am beginning to discover who the me is that was so fully hidden under the fearful stillness that was me all those years.

The police and ambulance people were very nice. His bloated body was transported and it was almost as if the entire house sighed with relief. No one doubted how he had come to his end. He slipped was intoxicated and didn’t break his fall correctly. It would be my secret how I wanted something like that to happen. Not that I was a coward for not killing him in the stillness of some other night, but I valued more the life I might have after, free of him and not behind bars.

It did not disappoint this new life of mine. Yesterday I banked the insurance money and today I am flying to New York for a little shopping before going to Europe. Beyond that I have no plans. I am in my fifties, I have a good thirty years left to really live. This is why women live longer than men, to taste freedom, if in your life dutifully married you did not. He lived in anger and hate, he was cruel, obnoxious and at every turn unrepentant for it. I never understood what he was getting out of it, all that anger.

He could not have liked himself much either, he at himself into nearly 300 pounds anger with sky high cholesterol. He was fifty four when he died, and for all those years I was the lone party standing by his grave side. My last act as the dutiful wife. That I cam this close to doing him in I would take to my grave with me.

I now stood about to board and aircraft for the very first time. Life unfolded with possibility. In my suitcase there was only one change of clothes. In New York I would buy, for the fist time since my late teens, clothes I liked, shoes I liked, and wear them without looking behind me worried I might be caught displeasing his highness and paying for it with my battered body. If I had used up for this lifetime any and all divine intervention, I would say the gods were generous and their timing exquisite, I not only had life now, but also life in the hereafter which I very nearly sacrificed.

The past few weeks seem like a blur in someone else’s life. I am still living in the fog of disbelief. That at long last I am fully free, that I get. I feel it in every cell of my being. Very slowly I am beginning to discover who the me is that was so fully hidden under the fearful stillness that was me all those years.

The police and ambulance people were very nice. His bloated body was transported and it was almost as if the entire house sighed with relief. No one doubted how he had come to his end. He slipped was intoxicated and didn’t break his fall correctly. It would be my secret how I wanted something like that to happen. Not that I was a coward for not killing him in the stillness of some other night, but I valued more the life I might have after, free of him and not behind bars.

It did not disappoint this new life of mine. Yesterday I banked the insurance money and today I am flying to New York for a little shopping before going to Europe. Beyond that I have no plans. I am in my fifties, I have a good thirty years left to really live. This is why women live longer than men, to taste freedom, if in your life dutifully married you did not. He lived in anger and hate, he was cruel, obnoxious and at every turn unrepentant for it. I never understood what he was getting out of it, all that anger.

He could not have liked himself much either, he at himself into nearly 300 pounds anger with sky high cholesterol. He was fifty four when he died, and for all those years I was the lone party standing by his grave side. My last act as the dutiful wife. That I cam this close to doing him in I would take to my grave with me.

I now stood about to board and aircraft for the very first time. Life unfolded with possibility. In my suitcase there was only one change of clothes. In New York I would buy, for the fist time since my late teens, clothes I liked, shoes I liked, and wear them without looking behind me worried I might be caught displeasing his highness and paying for it with my battered body. If I had used up for this lifetime any and all divine intervention, I would say the gods were generous and their timing exquisite, I not only had life now, but also life in the hereafter which I very nearly sacrificed.