By K L Ehrie

At 1:47 a.m., the discharge nurse sends me home with five fresh stitches and a pamphlet for a domestic abuse support group. I walk past a couple of sleepy cabs, past the bus stop, and keep going until I am rounding the corner onto Union Park, where the new playground sneaks up on me. It’s been six months since they cut the ivory ribbon and released the children, but I’m still not used to the rigid landscaping and straight lines, enameled trash cans and wide, polished benches. I cross through the park and throw the pamphlet in one of the trash cans. 

I liked the empty lot better before, filled with craggy brush and mud puddles, uncolonized by hipsters. Its wildness was a comfort, a forgotten place that nobody saw. I used to come out here to sit, hidden in the dark of soil and grass where the lights of night in the city can’t reach. Now, under new street lamps, patches of artificial grass glimmer plasticly and the park arches its back, baring its goods to the world, like a young thing proud of what they possess. You couldn’t hide here if you wanted to.

Across the street, our apartment windows are dark. I try to trick myself into believing nobody is waiting there; my legs don’t want to move forward, cross the street, climb the stairs. My key in the lock grinds with bare finality, and the front door sweeps open like a sore throat, another pass at the scraped arc on painted floorboards. When I turn on the table lamp, the walls move in closer. I drop my keys in the wooden bowl. 

From the darkness at the end of the hall, her shrieking apparition flies toward me. I am so tired and sore that my instincts don’t work. I don’t even flinch. She stops short, probably owing more to me standing my ground than to my blue and swollen eye, now sewn up. This facade of courage—a new thing for me—stupefies both of us. To keep my nerve, I stare at the framed photograph on the wall behind her, us on a batik blanket, smiling in the sun at North Beach Festival three years before. It’s like staring at strangers.

The woman who once became my wife now sways before me, teetering against gravity. She leans against the wall, her eyes roll northward. I smile, then laugh—I don’t mean to, but suddenly the whole thing that was us is darkly comical—and my stitches pull tight, then sting. I touch my face, wipe the blood on my black t-shirt. She growls, slurring, “Bechou finkyereal speshul.” I’ve navigated the wilds of her addiction for long enough that I can hear the razor-thin slice of fear in her threat; still, I know better than to think I’m in the clear. She is far from fragile.

At an Independence Day celebration when I was nine, I watched hornets drawn into abandoned beer cans emerge wobbling and wavering—flying into lawn chairs, the hot barbecue grill, falling to the ground. The incapacitation of a thing I was scared of turned me into a sadist. I poked at the drunken wasps with a stick and won a welt the size of a hamburger for my efforts. It pulsed for days. 

I step around her as if I am confident. She doesn’t call my bluff. I keep going.

From the hall closet, I extract an overnight bag, then lock myself in our bedroom. My chest-shoulders-torso convulse with relief in a psychosomatic unburdening that it will take me years to shed. Surrounded by silence and the artifacts of us, I wait for her to begin pounding and begging. The dry cleaning sways in its plastic sheath from the closet door where I hung it yesterday. The day before that, I found more Fentanyl in her Burberry pants. She was no longer concerned with concealment and I realized I’d crossed the threshold into enablement. 

Her white doctor’s coat, the one I am constantly ironing, lies crumpled on the floor. I fight the urge to pick it up, smooth it out, and place it on the back of the chair. I hastily collect a few of my most important possessions (the jewelry box with the mother-of-pearl inlay peacock, containing my grandmother’s pin) and necessary items (underwear, of course, socks and shoes, t-shirts, jackets, and pants, my pillow) and throw them into the bag, but my needs are slippery, and I know I’m making the wrong choices. Rifling in the back of the closet for a sleeping bag, our satin wedding dresses fall from their hanger. I recoil as if burned, proceed on muscle memory, and tell myself I’ll come back later for the rest. 

I open the door silently, look down the homestretch. She’s still in the hall and stares at me and then at the bag in my hand. Now she laughs. I move quickly toward her, and before she can react, I write a surprise ending: I lift my free hand and tenderly cup her face. The dark pools of her heavily lashed eyes lock onto mine. They are bloodshot, and she looks like a damaged cherub. Something in me lurches; there are things I will miss. She sinks to the floor, and I want to summon parting words, but we have already said more than everything.

I remove my rings, the reason I came back, and drop them into the wooden bowl. I extract my keys and leave the table lamp on. The predawn gloom welcomes me. In the park, a breeze lulls the swings back to sleep. The quiet city is a comfort. I walk away through a cascade of turning leaves in the jaundiced glow of streetlights, and the wind begins to untether me from the promises I made.

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K L Ehrie’s short fiction has appeared in Umbrella Factory Magazine, Perceptions Literary Magazine, El Portal Literary Journal, and Isele Magazine. A native of the United States heartland, they now reside in the Netherlands with their wife and daughter.