This appears in a pre-2010 issue
of cc&d magazine.
Saddle-stitched issues are no longer
printed, but you can requesting it
“re-released” through amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.
They’d been fighting for years; even threatened divorce
from time-to-time; always about “the drinking.” But
something kept their marriage going until that
one day in June.
He couldn’t understand what made that day different
from the day before or the three thousand two hundred forty one days
before that. Okay, okay, so this time he hit her and tried to
choke her; bent her like Gumby over the second floor balcony railing.
But, it wouldn’t have happened had the wife not
gone and grabbed the daughter and ran her upstairs to her
room, hissing, “Don’t you dare come out!”
as she shut her door.
The husband was just trying to discipline the girl
and charged up the stairs after them but the wife was blocking the girl’s
doorway — all 120 pounds of her fear and fury
filling the space. And the girl, she was so scared;
She’d never seen her daddy so crazy mad
and her mom? something in her mom’s voice
made the girl dare not turn that doorknob.
And then the sister - she was just 4 -
She started coming up the stairs, trying to give the father her
teddy bear, sobbing, “Daddy, Daddy, pleeease take Teddy-Bell,
pleeease take Teddy-Bell,” and the mother started screaming at the sister,
“Don’t you dare come any further, stay downstaris, s t a y
d o w n
s t a i r s!”
But the wife had made him mad, real mad, and he just snapped and
grabbed the wife. Okay, okay so this time he hit her
and tried to choke her; bent her like Gumby over the
second floor balcony railing.
But he had a right to discipline his daughter. His daughter
had ignored him when he’d yelled at
her to “shut the FUCKING TV off; NOW,
God Dammit!” The daughter had just sat there,
watching The Little Mermaid as if her life depended on it.
It really was the wife’s fault, you know. He wasn’t
going to hit the girl; he’d never hit his
daughter - ever, but the wife went and butted in like she always did
when he tried to discipline the girls ——— at night.
And then the wife would go on
about it the next day,
about how he’d done this or that,
nagging him, always nagging him to stop the drinking.
The wife was wrong, though. Boy was she wrong.
The drinking had nothing to do with it;
It was the wife; she had
pro-voked him and now look what she’d done;
Gone and wrecked a perfectly happy family.
Well he wasn’t taking her back, no siree. Unless of course she
apologized for making him mad, mad enough to hit her;
choke her; bend her like Gumby over the second floor balcony railing.
