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Audio/Video chapbooks cc&d magazine Down in the Dirt magazine books

 

Ex Love



Christopher A. Clark

��I dropped the empty box on the floor and filled it with the meager collection of videos she left behind. Most were recorded movies I rarely watched. I looked over each worn label and tried to remember each tape’s contents. Moving, one of those harsh times for pack rats. Deciding what I could and couldn’t live without stressed me, especially when I had nowhere to go but the motel.

��I catalogued each tape in my brain and placed it into the box next to its brothers. I stopped when a seemingly innocent label in black marker caught my eye. ‘Wedding’. That was all it said, but it may as well have said ‘nuclear holocaust’ as my insides raged. My hands held the tape like an archeologist holding an old bone and for a few minutes I actually forgot about what was in the trunk of my car.

��In front of the TV, I sat with crossed legs and popped the tape in the VCR. There we were behind the wedding cake, all smiles. Hope filled our eyes and we laughed, stuffing cake into each other’s mouth. I watched like some voyeur in the window of someone’s life. Could that have been me in the tuxedo beside the fresh bride?

��It seemed so far away, so long ago. That was not me on the screen, that was someone I used to be, someone that cared and loved. Someone I’d never be again.

��She was smiling at the old me. No, she was beaming. Her special day, her little girl’s dream coming true, walking down the aisle with a long train and a church full of people, was a reality. She looked at the then me with eyes filled with love and devotion. A stream of memories went through my head:

��Her face smiling.

��Her laughing.

��Her face filled with the passion of lovemaking.

��Her face while sleeping.

��Her face crying.

��Her face red and screaming.

��Her look of indifference.

��Her face while she lied.

��Her face filled with pain and horror.

��In the end, I’d seen all her faces.

��I stopped the video and ejected it. In my hand, I stared at it like it was responsible for the old feelings. I closed my eyes and leaned against the coffee table, tapping the video against my foot, unsure if I would finish packing.

***


��“Come on,” she panted between breaths. “Give it to me,” said her voice, low and gravelly. I looked down at her body in the dark, older, much older than me.

��“Come on baby, give it all to me.” She tried to purr, like a good little actress, but it sounded more like mumblings of a bored phone sex operator.

��I concentrated on the moment, the sensations of being inside her, but nothing, no enjoyment.

��“I haven’t got all night,” she said a little louder, a clue to how much she really wanted it.

��The last hour I hammered her with everything I had, but nothing. I moved her legs and body all around, trying anything I could think of, but no dice.

��At last, I stopped and she rolled away. Her nakedness was luscious in the dark, but homely in the light as she clicked the lamp on in the motel room. She shook her head and lit a cigarette.

��“Are you done finally?” she asked.

��I said nothing, looking for something on the wall behind the TV. Maybe what I was looking for was there. She puffed hard on the cigarette and looked expectantly at me.

��“You’re the cutest customer I’ve had in years hon. I’ll give you a few more minutes if you need it.”

��I shrugged and we went at it once again. I moved against her like I wasn’t there, like someone controlled my body and I sat in a waiting room somewhere, waiting for whomever to come through a set of double doors and give me what I wanted. Twenty minutes later, she groaned and pushed me off.

��“Maybe next time,” she purred again, sounding like a doctor after an examination. I said nothing and lay down. Tired, sweaty and unfulfilled, I watched her wander into the bathroom. Urine tinkled and she soon returned, staring at me from the entryway of the room.

��“You’re a man baby. You must have drunk too much, that’s all.”

��I hadn’t the heart to tell her she disgusted me. I had thought I needed to satisfy an urge. She dressed, smiled again, and started to leave at 4 a.m., but I hurried to the door and locked it. Naked, I felt worthless and had to share that with her.

***


��Divorce court: no human being should suffer that moment, especially when neither of us could afford lawyers. Bearing all of life’s problems to some middle aged man in a robe seemed so odd. Especially, when she lied. She stood before the bald judge, vile crap spilling from her mouth about how I hit her and her son. About how I forced myself onto her when I was drunk one night two years ago. She told him I slept with other women. She told him I left her homeless and broke when the two of us separated.

��The judge stared at me like I was the worst piece of filth he’d ever seen. Like I was some miscreant that stormed into his condo and pissed on his couch in front of his family. He asked for my side because he had to, but in his eyes I saw I was done. He merely had to ask for the record. Of course everything she said was untrue, and I told him that.

��Within minutes the judge banged down his all-powerful gavel and informed me I would forfeit the house, the car, and oh by the way, half my paycheck would now be sent to the state so that they can send it to her, since of course they could never give me her address.

��The grin she sent my way as we left the courtroom was probably what made me snap. Somehow I decided she had to pay. The ironic part was not once did I strike her while we were married. Not once. So when I stood over her lifeless body in her new apartment, my hand still full of her bloody hair, I actually chuckled. The most horrific moment of my life, and I fucking laughed.

��Digging the grave in the woods of Priest Point Park along South Puget Sound, I barely remembered. But carrying her body from the apartment to my trunk, that was like an eternity. Every sound, every movement of light in the dark parking lot made me aware of how alive I really was.

��Back in the motel room, the old hooker wasn’t so easy, probably because I didn’t really have the heart to kill her. The passion just wasn’t there I guess. She got away and screamed her head off all the way to the office. I locked the deadbolt, the knob, and the chain, leaned the mattress against the windows, sat against the far wall, aiming my pistol at the door, and waited.

��They’d be here soon. I was in no hurry. Holding the videotape, finger moving over the ‘Wedding’ label, I replayed it in my head. How did she go from beaming bride in the church to lying whore in divorce court? What transformation occurred, and how did I play a part? I did what all the books said, brought her flowers, and took her out on date nights, the whole shebang.

��Someone pounded on the door and I set the video down, raising the pistol. It would be any minute now. It would soon be all over.




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