Gun

{Excuses for the length.}

“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”

- Anton Chekhov

The blow hits her hard on the cheekbone and resonates like a gunshot in the kitchen. She recoils and falls to the ground, collecting her limbs around her, planting her chin as far down on her sternum as she can, trying to make herself into a hard little ball. If only he’d just leave her there and forget about her, stop seeing her.

He doesn’t, of course. She’s an easy target now, a raw little pile on the floor. It’s worse when he doesn’t see her face, it makes him lose control; he feels like she can say things and make faces he can’t hear or see. He can’t accept that, so he kicks her hard. Once, twice, he hits soft spots. She falls sideways into fetal position, squashed there like a dead insect. Except he knows she’s very much alive, he knows she’s trying to penetrate the yellowed linoleum and get away, so he kicks her again. Soft spots. He can feel spasms of muscles in her thighs, back, and side at each blow. Then he misses his kick and his boot hits something hard – her tibia – and a jolt of pain runs up his foot. He yelps and turns away from her, grabbing the kitchen table to stabilize himself.

He takes a swig of booze and breaths slowly, feeling every heartbeat in his toe. It’s the one with the ingrown nail, he should’ve been more careful. The kitchen is quieter now; he realizes he had been screaming before. There’s only the sound of his heavy breathing as he waits for the pain to recede, and her sloppy, useless sobbing on the floor.

He pulls a chair out from under the table, and sits on it, facing her. Slowly, he takes off his boot. The toe feels better already, without the pressure. He notices a little speck of red has bloomed on the white cotton, just over his injured toenail. He takes off his sock and inspects the damage. The pocket of pus on the side of his nail has burst, and a bit of dirty blood has tainted the nail, but there’s almost no pain now. Through his pail, hairy toes fanned out before his face, he can see her lying on the ground, still crying in soft, anguished shudders.

“You cunt,” he says.

***

It is after. After the fight, after he continued to drink and got more drunk. After the shouting, after the crying, after he punched her in the stomach, after he pushed her onto the bed and forced her underneath his hairy thighs and moist, heavy belly and slobbered all over her face with his drunken breath and cold tongue. After he wriggled himself out of his boxer shorts and ripped off her pajamas and touched her with his fat, wormy fingers, and after he rolled off her with a deep groan and fell asleep because he was too drunk to have an erection.

He is asleep, now; his snoring resonates in loud bursts in the bedroom. She can’t sleep, though. Her mind is racing, thinking hard, creeping out of her and across the bed, over the mound of his body, to his bed stand. She can’t stop thinking about what lies in that bed stand, that little silver key. Her minds take hold of the key and follows its path: off the bed, out of the bedroom, down the hall, into his office, to the worktable, second drawer down on the right.

Not quite sure of what she’s doing and what she will do, she rolls out of bed, rather stiffly on account of her bruises. He keeps on sleeping, on the other side. She walks around the bed and opens the drawer of his bed stand, where he keeps the little silver key. In the dark she perceives the contours of his clammy, red face. Her disgust gives her power; she grabs the key and walks out of the bedroom as silently as she can.

The carpet is soft and warm in the hall; its thickness seems to will her feet into immobility. She wills them on, careful step by careful step, until she reaches his office. It isn’t as dark, there. Through the window the street lights and passing cars send jagged strips of paleness on the walls and ceiling. She finally reaches the desk and inserts the key into the second drawer down on the right. For a moment the key jams a bit and she’s sure it isn’t the right one, unless he’s changed the drawer. Then she hears a metallic click and the key turns. She pulls open the drawer and takes out the gun.

It is bigger than she remembers from the few times she saw him pull it out to clean it. She has never held it before, and she stares at its every angle in the crooked grey light. She knows it’s loaded; she has heard him tell a friend he always keeps it ready: “You never know…” You never know, indeed. Her mind starts racing again. She’s not quite sure it’s really her, holding the gun in the gloom.

She thought the gun would give her power, but all she feels now is a crushing sense of failure. Tears streak down her cheeks and she’s seized with a sense of breath-wrenching dread; remorse for an action she hasn’t even committed. She knows what will happen now. All sense of resolution has left her. Was there ever a resolution? She is powerless, even now, even with him knocked out senseless in the bed.

The gun falls out of her trembling hands and lands with an echoed bang in the drawer. She almost hopes he’ll hear it and kill her for it.

She’s back in the bedroom, now. He is still asleep, but he has shifted in the bed and his snoring isn’t so loud. There is almost silence.

She puts the key back in the bed stand and goes to lie by him resolutely, dutifully, like a dog. She falls asleep.

In the dream she won’t remember, she kills him. Except once he is dead, there is nothing. Only emptiness.