The One Where She Kills Her Husband
08/21/06 6:14 AM – 6:34 AM
I watched their marriage from my backyard, curious to see what would happen. It was spring when they moved in and the cherry tree had not yet started to bloom. Whatever interesting would transpire would occur slowly, I hoped to see the signs of what was to come by late summer.
She killed him to the sound of snowflakes battering against their bedroom window in late February. The change was subtle to see. They were a quiet couple to begin with and you had to know their routine to know that it had changed. When she left in the morning, he was still asleep. When he went to sleep at night, she had already been asleep for hours. She was a veterinarian. He was a competent musician, but whatever it is that makes someone a creator was absent from his makeup. If he was playing covers, it was a good show to see. On the nights where he performed as himself, you went home tired.
It wasn’t that his songs weren’t any good. It was that there was nothing in them that made them work their way inside you and pop out as you made your daily rounds. What good is a song if it doesn’t catch you up? She didn’t have an ear for that sort of thing though, but there is some small thing in the bottom of the well that flies off at tangents to the conversation and paints the walls in soft blues and canary yellows. Even she, competent as she was, had to have it. The real trouble started in October, when the trees die with brilliant nonsense. I sat in my lawn chair, obscured from their view by a screen of peas and morning glory vines. She was calling the dog. “Charlie! Charlie!” she yelled, “Godamnit, Charlie!” That was the note of violence that I was listening for. I’d thought this through. The plant needed to be subtle yet heavy. When I dropped it over the fence, no one noticed, but the sound of the shovel on the frozen ground was too loud not to be.
I watched their marriage from my backyard, curious to see what would happen. It was spring when they moved in and the cherry tree had not yet started to bloom. Whatever interesting would transpire would occur slowly, I hoped to see the signs of what was to come by late summer.
She killed him to the sound of snowflakes battering against their bedroom window in late February. The change was subtle to see. They were a quiet couple to begin with and you had to know their routine to know that it had changed. When she left in the morning, he was still asleep. When he went to sleep at night, she had already been asleep for hours. She was a veterinarian. He was a competent musician, but whatever it is that makes someone a creator was absent from his makeup. If he was playing covers, it was a good show to see. On the nights where he performed as himself, you went home tired.
It wasn’t that his songs weren’t any good. It was that there was nothing in them that made them work their way inside you and pop out as you made your daily rounds. What good is a song if it doesn’t catch you up? She didn’t have an ear for that sort of thing though, but there is some small thing in the bottom of the well that flies off at tangents to the conversation and paints the walls in soft blues and canary yellows. Even she, competent as she was, had to have it. The real trouble started in October, when the trees die with brilliant nonsense. I sat in my lawn chair, obscured from their view by a screen of peas and morning glory vines. She was calling the dog. “Charlie! Charlie!” she yelled, “Godamnit, Charlie!” That was the note of violence that I was listening for. I’d thought this through. The plant needed to be subtle yet heavy. When I dropped it over the fence, no one noticed, but the sound of the shovel on the frozen ground was too loud not to be.
posted by Spike at 3:36 AM
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