Killing Him Softly
“Don’t fix me that turkey bacon crap. You know that’s not real bacon, right?”
She answered in her usual tone, enough to stop the questions.
An extra pat of butter was added to the scrambled eggs in the cast iron skillet where she’d fried the bacon and then his shredded potatoes. She made sure the butter and jelly reached the edges of his toast.
He complained about the clothes in his closet being too tight as he dressed for work.
“Would you like me to make you a wrap or a salad for your lunch, instead of a sandwich?”
He made a face, that face, the face. The one that said he didn’t like whatever she was saying.
She made him a sandwich on thick slices of toasted bread with mayonnaise, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and honey roasted ham and wrapped it in wax paper. Into his lunch went the usuals: four or five cookies, a sliced apple, half of an orange, sliced, a banana, a bag of popcorn, a hard-boiled egg, and a length of string cheese. He’d eat all this over the course of his work-day along with five dollars worth of candy from the vending machine.
For dinner, he expected the staples, meat, starch, and vegetables. The meat could vary from beef to chicken to pork, but it had to be there on his plate, even though the doctor had told him a salad for dinner two or three nights a week would be good for him. Along with a little exercise.
He’d bitched at his wife the entire way home from his appointment, even when they’d stopped at the grocery store where he loaded up their cart with paper wrapped packages from the meat counter. He wasn’t going to let a doctor tell him how to live his life.
A tear fell from the tip of her nose, landed on his ashen cheek and rolled under the breathing tube. She didn’t wipe it away.
His wife stood up straight and sighed, her shoulders rising and lowering with her breath as if she could really will the tension between her shoulder blades away.
Closing her eyes she listened to the machines in the room, doing their job of keeping her husband alive. But not for much longer.
In a few minutes, she’d let the kids in to say their goodbyes. She’d chosen to go first and let them have his last moments on earth.
“Goodbye, dear.” She didn’t know what else to do. What more could she say and what would it matter? Once the machines were turned off, that would be it.
“You wouldn’t listen. You wouldn’t change,” she scolded him. “What was I supposed to do? I just couldn’t go on, living like that.” She paused, putting her hand over her mouth.
“I was only doing what you told me to do.”
Nanci Arvizu writes from a chair with a view of wide-open spaces, non-fiction essays on Transgenerational Dysfunction, Surviving Narcissism, and Sexual Trauma, and mind-twisting fiction, dystopian to satire, short stories, novels, and screenplays. She is currently rewiring her brain by reading 200 Books in a Year. Visit www.nanciwrites.com.
