LatinosUSA

She pushed her finger in the buzzer and it was like she was poking him directly in the eye the way it made his head ache. It was one of those old spring-loaded doorbells that carried a high dose of electricity like pressing on a pack of bees. She could feel the reverberation from her fingertip up her arm and then cast off her nose ring and the other metals in her ears and belly. He rolled over with a moan and almost fell off the bed. Rolling over hurt so bad. He would crash to the floor on his hip and ribs if that could draw the pain away from his spine. The arms on the clock were unforgiving. Damn, it’s already afternoon. He was supposed to have met her in the park with the dog at ten thirty and that was a great leniency from years back when they first met one another there close to dawn. She threw the ball for as long as she could and Exodus outlasted her, tongue extended; the zoomies never ended. That’s what you get from a Belgian Malinois.

They smoked in the backyard. Small talk. He stared off into the distance while listening to her voice thick with affection and felt the paper soft between his fingers and the texture of tobacco cuts and he wished that smoking was not bad for you or that he had not known it was bad for you like how ignorant people declared ignorance bliss. He was up all night rolling them and lighting them and practicing deep breathing on the inhale. Watching the ghost of his chocolate lab try to chase her tail. She left the earth,too. When it rains it pours. Sometimes he dreamed of when she was a puppy in brief intervals. Hypnos retired from the field and left all the insomniacs under the care of Morpheus, son of Hypnos, who prescribed dreams yet was lacking in the art of sleep.

He was a train wreck and they both knew it. They switched tracks on him while he wasn’t looking and now he was headed straight for a collision and there was an eye in the tunnel there getting larger and outside of winning the damn lottery or some genius developing a miraculous new approach for pain management, he was a goner.

She picked up some things from the store. Some Red Vines and Aleve. A six pack of Rockstars. A karaoke machine with a gold microphone and it was flamboyant and ridiculous but she would do anything to cheer him up. “Where’s my lifetime supply of Oxycontin?” he joked.

A little back beat and the lyrics on the phone and let it rip. So out of tune it was funny. One song she landed perfectly. Sent emotions tingling up and down his torrid spine. Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time. His eyes welled up just to feel something different than pain. This is what you get when you don’t pay attention and you lose your balance and fall off a twelve foot ladder. He had been scraping off dead paint before priming and his phone rang in his back pocket. Anxious for a call about his stepfather who was in the hospital after a car accident. Next thing he knew he was horizontal.

Any time he thought about it the scent pervaded his nostrils. Fresh primer. Spilled from the can that fell with him to the earth and pooled like milk blood around his head, matted in his hair. He exhaled a cloud of tobacco yet all he could smell was the lead and barium. He remembered laying there unable to move waiting for some jerk to outline him in chalk at the crime scene.

She did his dishes which were always in the sink these days because it hurt his L7 to bend forward. His existence boiled down to a marriage of letters and numbers. The worker’s comp case that had been going on for a couple years and seemed like it would never end. Eternal frustration with himself, his body, his life and what it had become. Lawyers and doctors. Interrogations to undermine his injury, minimize his pain, and poke holes in his case.

How do you know you are defeated? You know. Time after time he approached a simple chore around the house that had been effortless before. Oh it was completely fucked and no sugar coating could hide the awful taste. Lead and barium. He had lost weight and lost interest in food. She did what she could for him. She cooked meat and potatoes and veggies in the crock pot. She knew the man she loved was somewhere buried back behind those eyes and she wanted him back oh so badly. No. That was a lie! The man she loved was right here, right here. Wasn’t he?

“Did you get the job?” He asked.

 She nodded.

“Ya? Good. That’s good. I am so sorry.”

“Don’t” she said, “Please don’t.”

“But I am.”

They would get through it together. So I’m gonna be working all the time, she told herself, so what? Some people work three jobs. Stepping up was automatic for her. She got hard on herself when she was drained and wanted to give up. Three hours after her shift at Walmart ended, she sat at a desk answering phones and pushing basic paper. Come hell or high water she would force her tired bones into that car and into that office building under the crackling high power lines, and channel some of that electricity to carry on. It wasn’t a big deal once you got yourself there.

“I’m useless,” he said. He wanted to but couldn’t even make love to her.

“Don’t say that,” she said. She wasn’t meaning to silence him. “When you tell yourself something long enough you start to believe it.” There were tears forming in his eyes again. She had that effect on him. What he would give to do all the things he couldn’t do anymore … to make love to her until she came, to be way up high on a ladder, to move his body easily to a rhythm. He had an urge to drive into the tunnel full speed to end the pain. Find out what’s beyond a shattered body …

A white light?

A loving presence?

He already had that. She loved his sorry useless defeated self. He didn’t want her to go yet he hated her coming over to see him like this. He summoned the god of arguments. Yelling and fighting felt like a testament to his will. Fighting words to prove he still had strength. He wanted her to fight fire with fire. It was bigger than his fear of sabotaging the whole relationship. Kindness felt like an insult to the truth.

Maybe I oughta sabotage it, he wondered, so she can be free. She didn’t ask for this. He could see how tired she was from working. How her shoulders slumped and she didn’t wear make up anymore. Some days all she could do was be there with him. And then he stopped fighting her. Let them be together in perfect silence like a prayer in church. She saw through it. All the bullshit. “I’m not leaving,” she would tell him when he had her at the end of her rope. Took a deep drag off a rolly and dropped it in the coffee can between them. “I’m not fucking leaving you.”