Diamond, Once Carbon (March 5, 2009. Issue 1)

It’s hard to beg for your life with a mouth full of gun barrel. She does manage it, though, with her eyes. He drinks in the wretched fear and pleading which backlights her irises, feeds on the flicker of hope in her eyes that she’ll live to suffer this another day. He inhales the certain knowledge which passes between them that her life turns upon the knife-edge of his whim. Seeing that she does not dare flinch, he expands with an electric thrill.

Watching her eyes, he is born again. Blood and sap course through his veins; he stretches tall and draws a breath full of lightning and thunder, full of power.

Their anniversary, which he never forgets, is near. He glances down the gleaming metal rod to her. He has bound this woman to himself with vows and white lace. She helps him find his edges when the outside world treads heavy upon him, blurs his boundaries. He would not put it into words, but, safe behind these sacred doors of his home, what he does to her reshapes him, gives him back his reflection in the mirror.

As she kneels before him beside the toilet, he cocks the gun. As the bullet chambers, the sound of the small metal phallus sliding into the slick bore is louder than anything. It clicks into place, a perfect fit--bullet spooning with gun barrel. The bullet is poised, ready to be ejaculated into her mouth. A pot of lima beans has brought them to this.

Domestic terrorism—an unanticipated explosion of a side dish. He does not know she is noticing a sneer on his face, losing the small amount of fluid left in her bladder.

Lima beans. Such a messy, mundane thing, after all the spectacular art they have made together. He shakes his head; the gun moves, bumps her teeth. So many times, he remembers, he acknowledges, only to himself; he has painted an impressionist sunset of glorious reds, blues, and violets upon the canvas of her white arms and thighs--yet the oils fade, refuse to hold their pigments, revert to the muddy green-yellows of a sky portending a new storm. He craves permanence.

Wherever she goes, there is his studio. The medium of her face allows him a subtle and richly-layered work. Her face is a bas-relief in white marble: He does not mar it with pigments. Their art together is not vulgar and ostentatious; it is not for the eyes of others; it is sacred between them.

Her fine features are sculpted by the caress of his dirty look, are molded by her crushing need to placate. Insults and mockery accomplish the erosion of her countenance; cruel words carve the valleys between her cheeks and mouth. The steady drip-drip of belittlement erodes the skin upon her brow, cuts ravines into the delicate skin around her eyes.

Her eyes, under his tutelage, have become performance art--down they are cast, away they jeté, from any other male they might accidentally encounter. Back to him they make fragile pirouettes, tentative, checking.

He thinks of all they have created together, and stretches a hand to the side of her head, feels the very electricity of her hair shrink away from him.

~ ~ ~

Always trust your gut; she’d once listened to a self-defense expert on a talk show, glancing up while ironing his work shirts. Your gut. Unseen organs within the abdomen, ignored by most, are an immediate part of her daily living. Her gut, tempered, hammered, made metallic with blood, adrenaline, is a near-perfect sextant, able to gauge the height of the sun-god, the proximity of destruction. Nevertheless, today it has failed her; she has not anticipated learning the taste of gun oil this day.

Earlier, she had been completing tasks from the list he had given her for this day, tedious humdrum Wednesday, when she had realized she’d overestimated the amount of time she had left.

Wednesdays, when the adrenaline she gets is sometimes just from hurrying, hurtling towards his arrival home from work.

Always, she is assigned back-to-back, frantic-paced chores on Wednesday, the day she leaves the house to do the food-shopping. She thinks: There is never enough time.

Fire is another thing she fears, but she’d decided to leave the dryer running while she made a mad dash to the grocery store. Some risks had to be taken. Maybe she’d get it all done.

She was grateful that she had remembered to ask what he’d eaten, when he’d called again after lunch, so she would know what to fix for dinner. Or rather, especially what not to fix.

Upset she’d forgotten her coupons, she had driven to the store as fast as she dared; she was afraid of the police, too.

One night, she had seen the blue and white lights of police cars reflecting in the bay window of their house, strobe-lighting the hedges out front. She had heard, from upstairs, his muffled camaraderie with the deputies. She’d heard the conspiratory chuckling of the locker room. When one of them had finally called her downstairs for “her side of the story,” the hard eyes peering at her from under straight-brimmed uniform hats had already made their decision.

He had put his arm around her ribcage while the deputies had reprimanded her and cautioned her not to fight or throw things anymore. Late the next night, he had mixed up gallons of weed killer and liberally sprayed all of the neighbor’s prize-winning rose bushes.

The grocery store. God, she had parked already, nothing in front of her but asphalt, no rosebushes. In the grocery store, she had rushed from aisle to aisle, her eyes darting everywhere, sorting the possibilities, trying to guess what will satisfy him this day, what she might need on hand to please him over the next week.

Like an answer muttered to the riddle of the Sphinx, in the middle of the main aisle, she had seen the huge display of lima beans on sale. Some manager of this store--perhaps a frustrated sculptor of metal--had caused to be stacked in an elaborate and potentially unstable pyramid, large, heavy cans of unattractively-labeled lima beans, and then had slashed the prices.

Here was a chance for her to shine. He liked lima beans, claimed to love them, in fact; and he certainly liked her to save money. She loaded up the cart; she despises the gritty, pasty texture of lima beans.

She will fix them for him tonight and he will praise her for stocking up and for saving money. She tosses other needed items into the cart with all the leisurely abandon of a winner of a sixty-second shopping spree, and rushes to the checkout. She hurries the process along by helping to bag her own groceries; a lump comes to her throat when the cashier is especially nice to her.

Back in the car, she is about to turn the key and start home when she sees something on the front passenger seat that freezes her hand.

It is her cell phone. It is lying where it shouldn’t be. It should have been in her purse, with her in the store. She can’t imagine how she’s been this careless. She doesn’t want to look, knows she has to.

She can’t stand cliffhangers; she reaches for it--maybe it’s okay after all.

Her right index finger is surprisingly under her volition, barely shakes at all as she clicks the “On” button.

ONE MISSED CALL

She swipes her fingers across her eyeballs, removes a dry, sticky film, looks again, though she is already sure.

ONE MISSED CALL

She is startled by the honking of someone who wants her parking place, looks up at them dumbly, can’t focus enough on the face behind the wheel of the other car to tell if it’s an impatient man or a woman. Her eyes return to the train derailment:

ONEMISSEDCALLONECALLONEONEONE

She can’t think why she can make her fingers do what she says when her eyes are being so contrary. She thinks of just driving away. Away as far as the full tank of gas will take her; the car is loaded with food. Under what circumstances, other than those at home, would she be forced to eat canned lima beans, perhaps uncooked? She has no money; her grandmother’s quilts, one of them cut into pieces, and her mother’s wedding ring are at home. Hidden away, her beloved childhood copy of The Velveteen Rabbit.

She checks. Already almost twenty minutes since he has called. She contemplates breaking the phone in some way, shudders, cannot imagine the repercussions of that.

She decides she cannot bear the look the cashier would give her if she ran back into the store, and begged the girl to talk to him, confirm where she has been, what she has been doing. She will just call him back now, explain; he will see the new groceries later; it will be okay.

He is not in his office, the first two times she tries. The third time, when she has barely managed to punch in the numbers, he is sweet and lovely, laughs it off, flirts with her as of old, says he can’t wait to see her at home.
’d run in and buy it for her, no matter the cost. She had felt sorry for other girls.

Now. She is not dreaming auld lang syne outside the grocery store now; she is at home; it is dinnertime, and there is a gun in her mouth.

She is gagging not just because the rifle barrel is shoved to the back of her throat, but because of the biting taste of gun cleaner and oil. She is not sure how much longer, without moving, she will be able to bear her aching knees or the look in his eyes. She really hates cliffhangers, can’t stand the not-knowing.

She looks beyond his eyes, remembers another time when she was on a tile floor. She had awakened curled on her side on the kitchen floor, copper patina on her tongue, the smell of orchids and pine trees in her throat. It was their first Christmas. She does not even remember what it was about. She does remember how sorry he was, for almost seven months.

~ ~ ~

Looking at her kneeling there, he remembers how beautiful she was to him.

She was perfect; she made him feel real. He had felt so strong, so protective of her. He would still give his life for her, kill anyone who tried to hurt her.

A waking dream is in his eyes, he wonders if she can see it. That pinnacle of a day, standing before him within a rainbow arc of sunlight bent by the strength of stained-glass, she had looked a miracle in handmade lace and seed pearls. He craved permanence, and he paid a minister to seal her to him.

She never looked quite that way to him again. In their house, in fluorescent light, in jeans and curlers, she was brought low. New in their marriage, every kiss, every loving expression she gave him, revealed her to him as low-caste, and slavish.

Years more, every day, in some small way or another, she disappoints him; a piece of her glory falls away. He tries to prop up the crumbling structure; he shores her up at first with caring condescension. When that fails, more fervently he pounds the clay of her flesh. He fears he has not the talent to make this work: Again and again his medium confounds him, springs back with a warm will of its own. Pygmalion had obliging stone--he covets the myth--for him, Galatea is never finished.

~ ~ ~

She has the groceries neatly put away, the laundry folded, and dinner well-started when he gets home this night. He comes smiling in--he has brought her daisies. She cannot believe it, just like Wednesdays, before. He kisses her hard on the mouth, nuzzles her neck. She feels butterflies in her stomach; the original emotion to which they belong she has long since lost the ability to identify.

She stiffens as he drops to his knees before her, embracing her waist and clumsily disguising a sniff directed at the fly of her jeans. Vomit bubbles to the top of her throat. She remembers him telling her, long ago, about his first wife cheating on him, about how she had smelled different, down there, when she had come back from the other man.

She dares not soil the carpet with her emotion; she slaps her hand across her mouth, swallows, holds it in. She knows in her gut that she is in real danger now, right now, tonight; but she has so long ago slipped into this way of living that she doesn’t know how to start stopping. If someone were to just shove her one step out the door, tell her--Yes, you’re right; you’re not the crazy one; you need to go--this time, she would run and she would run, maybe.

But she feels it, she is so his work of art, he has so shaped her, painted her in such a light that she is unable to take one step on her own.

They go to the kitchen; he is not happy that dinner is not yet ready. She casts her face down to hide that her lip quivers as she puts the cheerful daisies in a blue-striped vase and sets them in the middle of the kitchen table. When he goes upstairs to change, she breathes, and rinses out her mouth.

He is still a handsome man; women flirt instinctively with him. He can be charming and funny: Women at parties tell her how they envy her. Sometimes, one or another of them will smile secretly in her direction, and she knows. She does not feel sorry for them; nor can she muster more than a weak anger at them; they will see the other side eventually. She wishes he would fall in love with one of his affairs, run off and leave her alone. She never wishes this when blowing out birthday candles.

He has an athlete’s build; he is quiet and graceful on his feet. She is stirring the saucepan full of hot lima beans, and she has not heard him come up behind her. As she startles, and half-turns toward him, he begins to taunt her in a soft, caressing voice. She focuses on the wooden spoon she is gripping, does not look at him, tries not to listen. Her ears flinch away from the rape of his words.

Whore, he calls her, after all I’ve done for you. He grabs her chin in a vise-grip of two strong-sinewed fingers, turns her, forces her to look into his eyes. The wooden spoon clatters to the stovetop. Fuzzily, she thinks of the smudge it must have made on the gleaming surface.

He clamps down on her wrist, causing the bracelet she is wearing to bite deeply into the skin of her arm. He had bought her this heavy tennis bracelet of huge cubic zirconias after a particularly dicey trip to the emergency room. They’re better than real diamonds, he had told her. Diamonds are always flawed, to one degree or another. These are created by the hand of man; they’re perfect; they suit you, he had said, sounding like the smarmy sales clerk at the mall jewelry store. She hated being cuffed around the wrist by all those glitzy, made-up stones, hated having to wear it for him.

He looks like a wicked little boy as he steps further into her face. She thinks, He must have had a very bad day. He won’t talk to her about his childhood, but she can sometimes see it in his face, in fleeting expressions as he strikes her.

The edge of the stove pressing hard into her buttocks, she feels a rush of pity, not for herself, but for him; she sees him as a child of four, taking it out on the dog. She believes, makes herself believe, that there is a part of him hidden away, unbesmirched by whatever, whoever, made him this way. She has spent years clinging to that ephemeral core of him, loving that part of him.

Tonight, he evolves. He tries something new. Up his hand vaults, sideways it comes whistling towards her face, millimeters it stops from her right cheekbone. The shock of not being hit stuns her; she has no time to catch her breath before the pendulum swings the other way. Slicing through the air from the other side comes his hand, a hair’s breadth from her left cheekbone it slams to a stop. With each blazing non-impact, she finds her head snapping left to right like a chair judge at Wimbledon.

Whore, whore, beats the metronome. Did he like your bracelet, he almost-hits her again. She thinks of the gritty lima beans she is fixing for him, would have sat down at the table and eaten for him. She cannot see; too busy flinching. Blind, her hand flies back and finds the saucepan handle on the first try.

As she lets loose the explosion of hot lima beans full in his face, her legs are already scrambling. Her upper body is fighting back, but her faithful sextant--her gut--already knows she is dead, takes her in flight to the one room in the house with a lock, the master bath. The roar of his rage and the thudding of his pursuit spur her to a speed she hasn’t had since she was twelve years old.

Even so, it is so close that his fingers snake through and grab the edge of the door as she slams it behind her. She feels something important transform inside her, something that implodes, that enables her to push against his pink, wriggling flesh, ignore his shouts of pain, become the inexorable one. As he yanks his fingers back, she slams and locks the door in one fluid motion.

Most people have no reason to pay attention to the flimsy construction of interior doors. She knows only steel would suffice; she has merely delayed the inevitable. She whirls, pulls out drawers, dumps them, searches through the scattered objects. Nothing. She rips the shower curtain from its hooks; nothing behind there either. Nothing in the closet. She has wrapped a thick towel around her fist and has started for the large mirror over the sink when she hears the splintering sounds.

She is not able to summon the coordination of her limbs that it would take to turn around: She watches in the mirror as the door caves in and his hand not holding the rifle fumbles to unlock the door. She watches in the mirror the quick grace of his strides as he goose-steps across the room to her. She sees his free hand grab the back of her hair before she feels the pull of the pain.

Her mouth is so dry she is surprised that the barrel of the gun slides so easily between her lips, clatters across her teeth, tickles the back of her throat. What she thinks about is how bad it tastes, how it gags her, and how her knees ache on the linoleum. What she sees is little white lines of pressure on his big, tanned knuckles as they squeeze the trigger. What she wonders is, if she gives in to the need to cough and gag, will that--added upon his white knuckles--be enough to make the gun go off?

She sees the two of them in the mirror, the perfect angles, the lovely symmetry of the charcoal-blue line from his hands to her mouth. Suddenly, she gets “gunmetal blue.” It’s just like a painting, or a movie still.

When he yells something at her, shakes the gun hard enough that she feels one of her molars break open, tastes the tooth-pulp, only then does she manage to refuse the hypnotism of the mirror. Pulling her gaze away from the silver reflecting-pool over the bathroom vanity, she meets his eyes.

She uses her eyes to beg and plead; she knows it’s what he expects, what he needs. She knows she is ready now: It has taken more for her than for some, but she has her one step out the door now, if she can just make it there.

More than this, she knows she will not shatter into a mosaic of her former self, even if the gun goes off. He no longer has any tools sufficient unto her. Even if the gun goes off, she will have had these few moments when he had not the talent to touch her.

She takes a breath full of lightning and thunder. She pulls back her head, raises up her hand, whistles it through the air, slaps the barrel of the gun hard to the left, not sure if the report she hears is a shot, or the impact of her hand. She sees in the mirror how shocked his eyes are, how his mouth hangs open like a dullard.