5 Minute Reads | Anthology

A Day In The Life of Marilyn

by  south_like_sherman 

Morning for Marilyn Walker will go like this: she'll wake with the sun, and for a moment, appear almost see-through in the untouched, golden light of dawn. See, Lyn will always look the most beautiful when she's easiest to shatter. In this brief moment of porcelain grace, it's easy to pretend she's happy. This illusion will fall apart soon enough, as she scrapes the bronze curls away from her face, gathering them into a taught knot. She'll leave for work, mascara already clumping and her hand will hover just above the door-knob before she goes. But she has a fresh coat of lipstick on, and her job is not one that will wait for her. She's ready— or as ready as she'll ever be. On the way to the subway, she'll wonder whether she turned the oven off, even though it's been months since she last cooked, and she'll twist the gold band absently around her fine-boned finger, as if to wear away her ivory skin into the same, shining, sun-like beauty of the ring. Her husband hasn't yet been forgotten.

For Abe Walker, his day will begin only when the sun is at the very highest in its arc, when it hangs in the sky as a huge, unblinking eye, golden only with the dregs of dawn. He'll wake as he fell asleep; with his eyes wide open. The first things he sees will be his own hands—and these he'll compare to guns, in the way that they were created only for destruction. Next he'll see the empty apartment, and the absence of his wife will appear to be the norm. He'll almost forget that he fell asleep alone, slumped against a corner. There's still something of a soldier about him; something that, if one were to see him in the street, would either invoke pity or a sudden desire to cross to the other side. It's been three years since Syria, yet the smell of gunpowder still lingers on his skin, in the creases between bands of scar tissue and worn-away muscle. Abe's eyes will dart around the room, vision so blurred he can almost pretend it's in focus; sharp clarity only made clearer by the fog. He still cradles last night's bottle in his hands as though it were a lover, fingers wound around the neck of the green glass like he might shatter it– after all, that's how Abe loves these days— with one hand on the bottle and the other on the air above his wife's neck.

* * *

Here's something to remember, Lyn: it used to be better. Lyn's mouth twists in a frayed kind of line, draped across her tired features as she pulls her bottom lip between her teeth. She reminds herself to hold onto that thought as she surveys the apartment, a forefinger picking at the peeling egg-shell plaster of the walls as the other hand presses the door shut behind her with a soft click. She picks her way over the shattered fragments of a beer bottle, scattered across the kitchen floor, tapered shoes slipping over the cracks of the glass and splitting the heavy air like a blade with a sharp, crunching slide. The sound has become too familiar lately.

"Abe?" Lyn's voice seems too loud amongst the crushing weight of silence in the apartment as she braces a hand against the kitchen counter, feet finally clear of the hazardous glass. "Abe?" she calls again, because sometimes the first time isn't enough. Once she'd entered unannounced, and Abe had a knife, his eyes so wide that the whites had almost looked like crescent moons. Always waning. Needless to say, she'd learned her lesson.

Her mouth curls up at the edges like an old photograph as she glances back towards the mess in the kitchen, faded rose lipstick tacky and dry on her lips they shift. She can clean it up later.

She sees his fingers first—trembling, scraping against the floor like he's trying to break skin, like he's mistaken these walls for flesh. His lips are moving as he mumbles, an unbroken stream of silent words no one's ever going to understand falling from his cracked lips. His head is dropped between his knees in a bridge, back pressed into the corner of the apartment like he's trying to disappear, breaths shaky and uneven as invisible fault lines begin to shake. He's going to fall apart.

"Abe," she starts. Stops. Starts again. "I'm home."

Lyn twists her feet, rolling the joints of her ankle, arms hanging limp at her sides as one thumb picks at the nail of her forefinger. Her nail polish is chipped.

He starts at her voice, hands scrabbling up from the floor to cradle his face in his hands, fingers framing his face like a polaroid. The balls of his socked feet rock against the floorboards, a strangled kind of scream breaking free from the space of steel between his chapped lips, like he didn't have enough air in his lungs to make a proper sound. She thinks of the beer bottle, smashed against the kitchen floor.

Lyn crosses her arms over her chest, something rattling in her lungs. "I'm going to make dinner. Want anything?"

Abe doesn't reply, and his breath is like a knife, shredding the air. Ripping everything apart.

She kneels beside him, tucks herself in the corner as well and tells him to breathe, like her own breath isn't trapped behind her teeth. She's always been a hypocrite.

Lyn counts the minutes with her husband's breath, the long line of her neck tipped back against the hollow wall, one hand hovering just above Abe's shoulder. She wants to touch him, but— she doesn't, and that hurts.