I enter the living room to find him and the newfound wonder of how a room meant for living could be filled with so much decay. Sweat stains attack him, wrapping around his underarms and under his stomach and chest, forming little pools of water made for cockroaches to splash around in. There is a brown stain on his white tank top, presumably from where chewing tobacco dripped down his face; vile, but I suppose I must count myself lucky that he’s never lived up to the name of the shirt. I pray that day will never come. I see remnants of the stuff dangling from his open mouth as he inhales and exhales.
Empty chip baggies and snack wrappers and beer bottles litter the floor in a way that would make both hoarders and environmentalists cry. He grunts slightly, coughs as if he was much older than thirty and shakes a series of crumbs off himself as he turns on his side and starts snoring. A wet dog.
I shuffle to the kitchen, feeling both heavy and light, empty and full, turn on the tap and fill a glass with cloudy water. I can hear his body in the living room groaning under the weight of his idiocy and five beers a day. Mostly the second thing.
He is snoring loudly when I enter. I turn off the T.V., remove the remote from his stomach and heave the water, breaking like crappy meth against his face.
“What the fuck!” he barks as he sputters and splashes around in his open womb of a chair: a mess of water, human and dissolved food particles just waiting to start crying and screaming. He spats some water out of his mouth and brushes his now wet hair backwards into an Elvis meets waterpark kind of look.
“What the actual fuck!” he barks again, as if the repetition of the words would make me respond any differently. He stumbles out of the chair, knocking food off his stomach and crunching some wrappers under his bare and hairy toes. For a moment, I think he is going to trip over the coffee table before he catches his balance by leaning back to spit out the remainder of his tobacco into a metal pail near the chair. He wanted to feel like he was in one of those old western movies but always managed to fuck it up. I find myself staring into the saliva and the chewed up chew in the bottom of the pail. It's like an aquarium tank, complete with exotic creatures swimming around in the too small too dirty waters.
“Are you going to answer me, or are you just going to fuckin'— ” He cuts himself off when he sees that I am not paying attention, “Hey, bitch, you there?” He starts snapping in my face like he’s trying to call a dog.
"Don't fucking snap at me!" I get up in his face and start snapping back at him, somewhere between anger and trying anything to make him see me. Then, almost pleading, “And yeah, I’m here.”
“I sure the fuck hope so. Why the hell did you do that?” he asks while trying to pick chip particles out of the chair cushions. He seems to be half present in the conversation and half present in the chair. La-Z-Man patent pending.
“You know why,” I mutter.
He slumps back down, letting out a small sigh as he does. “Babe,” he beckons me over to him and tries to dry his face with his wife beater, “Babe, we’ve already talked about this; we are fucking done with it. I’m fucking done with it. It’s over; it happened. Get the fuck over it already. We are stuck with it now.”
“Well, I still want to talk about it,” I snap back.
He sighs and reaches for the remote, “What is there left to talk about? It happened already. It’s done.”
I look down at my stomach and run my hands over it, feeling what was once there “Yeah, it’s done.”
“Then what the fuck do you want to talk about?”
“I want to talk about me; I didn’t want this. I never wanted any of this.” I shout in a whisper.
“You wanted me. And, there is no ‘you,’ we've talked about this. There was never a ‘you’ or a ‘me’ or even an ‘us’ if we are being fucking pansies about it. There was never anything there. But, it’s different now.”
He flicks on the T.V., no longer looking at me. His face is dry now, but the blood that I see on his hands cannot be wiped off by any garment, no matter how violent or persistent. He’s a murderer.
“You made me do it. I didn’t want to. I never wanted to.”
“I didn’t make you do shit.”
“Bullshit.”
“Come on, babe. Calm the fuck down, it’s no big deal. Let's just call this a misunderstanding, and say it’s over now. We took care of it.”
“Took care of it? We took care of it? We would’ve taken care of it if you had just—”
“Just what?! What could we have just done? It happened. You know better than to go against His plan anyway. I'm done talking about this.”
“Well, I’m not!”
He stands up now, his body rumbling as he does, a contraction of muscles and flesh pushing his frame to stand tall. Taller than me. Looming.
“This conversation is over,” he says without emotion, “It’s over. There’s nothing left to talk about.”
“You’re a monster.”
“If anything, you are! When are you going to get it through your thick fucking skull that this isn’t about you?!” he screams, veins pulsating with beer warmed to body temperature and diluted with blood; an IV full of alcohol connected to his throat. I feel small.
“Then who is it about? Who? I was not ready for this. It certainly wasn't about me. Then, there's you,” I mime looking around the room with my hands, at the garbage, at the food, at him. "Clearly- clearly this isn't about you either." Tears are streaming down my face, mingling with the food and wrappers on the floor, creating a sea turtle’s worst nightmare: the modern ocean. "Who is it about, then? Who?" I am hysterical now, screaming, a banshee involved in mime.
He smacks me once across the face. Finally living up to the name of his shirt. The sting feels familiar, but lukewarm from wounds of the paste. It feels like my stomach feels. Pain.
I clutch my cheek in shock, feeling the blood rushing up from my stomach to my face, feeling the spot where his wedding ring broke the skin in a kind of twisted serpentine betrayal. He only stands there, looking at me and then back at his hands and back to me. Then he looks back to his beer in his spare hand. Me in one, the bottle in the other. He chooses the other.
He looks at me and reaches as if to touch me but then backs away himself. Then, always in a whisper “It’s about Him.” He quietly snaps these words at me and up towards the ceiling before turning back to the T.V.
He slumps back into his chair, the crinkling of the leather breaking the silence and the pain. He looks back to the T.V. and snaps back in place. He laughs at something on the monitor while I stand speechless. Alone.
There is a crash of something falling from the other room and I run over to it. The source of the noise is crying, now. I reluctantly start breastfeeding while he sits in the other room, watching television and thinking about God. I didn’t want this. As she suckles, I feel myself dying. I glance over to him in the other room, sucking down another beer.
