“I suppose you’re happy then.” her husband said from his seat in the middle of the couch. He was slumped forward, his elbows on his knees, forehead in his hands. “I supposed you’re fuckin’ happy.” He ran his fingers through his hair as he spoke.

She poured some water into the kettle and clicked the front burner on.

“Don’t act like you didn’t think it too. I’m not alone in this. Acting righteous doesn’t make it so you old bastard, God sees what the skin cloaks.” She said, setting the kettle on the burner. She usually knew to tread carefully around him, especially when he was like this. But he would not make her feel like shit about her own daughter, the one person she would have done anything for. She had given up everything she had to give.

“A hundred and ten thousand dollars? Jesus Marylin. Jesus Christ. Are you such a greedy bitch? Turn my daughter on me and take all my money.” He spat.

Marylin laughed and he stood from the couch, his face molten and contorting with rage.

Thomas confronted the murky apparition of himself in the mirrored door of his closet. Clouded eyes sunk back into cavernous, veiny sockets. He looked like shit. Stubble grew down from his jawline, where he usually kept it trimmed, sprouting out in brown-blonde patches. His face had taken on a grey tint. A high-pitched squeal hung over his world, his ears numbed by the self-victimizing wails of his young wife as he dragged his son’s waterlogged body out of the pond. She wouldn’t stop screaming and he had just needed her to stop. He slid the door aside, greeted with a wall of dark flannels. The scents of copper and oiled leather wafted out between the wood-worn cotton shirts as Thomas slid them aside to reveal a leather rifle case. Thomas pulled it out and sat on the bed with the leather case resting a crossed his lap.

Penelope rolled over, her skin pulling for a moment against the fabric of her pillow where it had been glued for hours in salted mire. She always woke a few minutes before her alarm screeched to life. She would wake up, wait for it to scream, and silence it for another day. The routine was weeks running. Before, she never needed an alarm, the crying would wake her. As her face tore away form her pillow, a glint of sunlight pierced the slatted wall of blinds, catching her eye for barely a moment, causing her to cringe. She wanted to shut it out, fill the cracks. The only thing she could contemplate was more sleep. Thoughts of anything else were terrible, they sent her heart reeling like an effervescent sludge was seeping into her valves. Her head was stuffed with a sickness rooted in heartache. It grew, a thorny shrub pressing against her temples and the back of her throat, a painfully slow asphyxiation via a thousand, thousand sobbing gasps for air. The leaves bushed from her tonsils, rough and dry, depriving food of flavor as they came to rest on the back of her tongue. She leaned over the bed she’d occupied for nine days and dry heaved her sorrows into a rubbermaid trashcan. The digital clock flicked from 6:26 to 6:27. Three minutes. Penelope wished so badly to hear her daughter cry again.

The slow roil of water absorbing heat bubbled from the stovetop. He was in the kitchen now and Marilyn could hear in the tone of his yell that his eyes had a yellow tint, glazed over with Monarch Vodka. She stared at the kettle and thought about how sturdy it looked, American made as he insisted everything in their house should be. She had stopped hearing him years ago, he’d given her the first concussion a week before their Amelia was born. The second and third came years apart. After the third her sister had told her she should take Ame and leave, and she’d tried. The first time he hit Ame she was seventeen. Marilyn had thought it was over at that point, that he had changed in some capacity. But she knew now that whatever poison was rotting in his veins was there to stay. It sat dormant, like Ame’s cancer had, waiting to emerge from somewhere dark and damp and rot them away. Steam drifted from the kettle, and he kept yelling, and she kept not hearing him until he crushed his knuckles against her teeth.

Thomas clicked the barrel against the inside of his mouth. It tasted unnatural he thought. No, not tasted, felt. It was so hard where it clicked against his teeth, like chewing on a nickel. He pulled the barrel out of his mouth and stared down it for a moment, a bead of his saliva pooled at the tip and then ran down the barrel. It came on suddenly, a vast amount of pain beyond his comprehension. He laid back on the bed hugging the rifle and rolling from side to side as bubbles of snot popped in his mustache.

“My boy.” He sobbed “My boy, my boy.”

He could still feel him sopping wet and cold and limp, a gash from the corner of the dock running along his temple, draining red ichor from his temple down into the the freshly sprouting stubble at his jaw. Thomas could still feel the muscles in his boys back where they were getting full and strong from early mornings splitting logs. He had rubbed his son’s callused hands against his cheek while his wife just screamed and screamed. He just needed her to stop screaming and call someone, anyone. Just call someone you cowardly woman. Please, please save our son. He prayed to God those callused, boney fingers would tangle in his beard and pull like they had done so many time when his boy was young. Thomas lay on his side, the rifle cradled between his legs, barrel in his mouth, thumb wrapped around the trigger.

6:28. Penelope quit heaving. She rolled onto her back and began to manually hyperventilate, her way of working herself into a fit that would make her cry again. If she could cry she could sleep again. Her husband would come in at 6:30, fresh off of a night on the couch. She couldn’t lay next to him. How it must be for him, to lay out there and listen to her cry. She thought about hearing her baby cry, her beautiful baby. Could she resist going to her crying baby boy? He had slept out there alone for two weeks now and listened, giving her space. Every morning she would hear him out there making breakfast, waiting for her alarm to come in and see if that day she would eat. He would leave for work at seven and come back by five to make dinner, and he would eat out there alone. The clock flashed 6:29.

“You won’t even talk to me? Our daughter dies and you won’t even talk to me? I might as well be alone!” He ranted and paced from the stove to the hall and back again.

Marilyn lay on the floor, still staring at the tea kettle as it started to whistle. The sun glinted off of it shinning gold like her babies hair before it all came off. Dead at twenty-seven. He’d put her in the hospital the second time, the night she’d given Ame eight hundred dollars and a bus ticket. The cops came that time, they asked her if he’s hit her and she said no. She needed him close, where she could keep an eye on him. Make sure he didn’t go after her Amelia. Her poor baby girl had escaped this, escaped him, to die in a hospital at twenty-seven, leaving her mother a life insurance policy for one hundred and ten thousand dollars. He hit her again and something in her ear made a pop.

Hit me. She thought. As hard as you want. This is your last chance.

The kettle shrieked and foaming water boiled out of the spout.

BLAM! Thomas paused, then kept pressing the trigger slowly with his thumb. He gazed down the barrel at the rifle’s hammer as it slowly arched back, the rising guillotine. The corners of his eyes were crusted together, he was calm now. He rubbed at the calluses on his hand with his less occupied thumb, accumulated from years of doing what needed to be done for his family. He pressed his tongue against the barrel. BLAM! Something loud echoed through the quiet of the house from outside. He waited a moment, listening, pushing slowly still against the trigger BLAM! POP! It was the truck, backfiring outside. She must be trying to go somewhere. She never could get the old thing started, it had to be him. He imagined her out there struggling with the old green truck and coming in to find him, soul on hiatus, smeared across the bed. No. He would have to start it. This could wait he thought, as he sat up and zipped the rifle back into its leather case.

6:30. The alarm blinked and shrieked. Penelope stared at it. It continued on with a piercing wail that somehow felt comfortably familiar to her. She didn’t try to quiet it. He came in just as it changed to 6:31, still screaming. She sat at the foot of the bed and startled him as he entered. They just stared at one another for a moment. He looked terrible, eyes bagged and brown from lack of sleep. The line of his beard was uneven and his shirt was wrinkled.

“Hungry?” he asked weakly “I made eggs. And english muffins.”

She left the edge of the bed and went to him without saying a word. She wrapped her arms around him and he tensed. They stood there awkwardly for a moment. Then he slunk forward, his face pressed against her shoulder. He let out one long ragged breath and began to sob. She supported his weight while warm tears ran down her neck and back. After a few minutes he stood again of his own accord. She dried his eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.

“Do we have jam?” She asked.

He smiled and guided her by the hand out to the dining room. The alarm continued to screech through breakfast, but neither of them seemed to care.