I didn’t jump, but my entire body gave a brief spasm of guilt and my coffee spilled down my front. I swore and began mopping it up with a used McDonald’s napkin that yesterday had encased a stale jelly donut. Unfortunately, tiny pieces of donut that had formerly been snuggled between the M and the A on the napkin found themselves rudely migrated to the front of my brown shirt that had originally been white.
Sally looked at me curiously, which made me blush. Then she frowned, which made me blush even more. Trying not to look suspicious, I began untying my shoe, simply to tie it again. After moving the rabbit around the tree and into the burrow, I looked up only to see I still had her attention, unwanted as it was.
“What’s going on?” She asked as I avoided her eyes. I watched her shadow as it moved and I guessed that she had folded her arms. The carpet needed some cleaning. There were crumbs all over it.
I looked at her chin. “Nothing.” I had hoped that the word would come out smoothly, however my voice cracked on ‘thing’ which it never does. I looked down at my feet again.
She exhaled gustily and stood up. I knew now she was really angry. She always looked undeniably sexy when she was upset. It was the way her nose crinkled in that feminine way, I suppose. I knew if I looked at her I would fall in love all over again, but I kept my gaze low. Now was no time for romance.
I opened my mouth. “Well, almost nothing.” Almost. Yeah right.
“What happened? Daniel, answer me!” She grabbed my shoulders and pulled me to a standing position. “Why was Mother so excited on the phone? Why are you so guilty at the sound of her name? What’s going on?”
She was quivering in her righteous anger. Her fingers were clinched so tightly that her knuckles were white. I spoke to her shins, “You can’t get too excited, Sally. That’s what the doctor said.”
She slapped me and I blinked once I realized it had happened. Sally never hit people. She never hit me. However, Sally had a monumental temper hidden beneath her pretty exterior. I took several deep breaths to calm down. After all, Sally was facing something I could never contemplate. However, despite my best efforts, I began to grow rather irritated at her. She wasn’t supposed to hit people!
“The doctor said that you should keep excitement to a minimum! You know what will happen if you get... ruffled.” I rubbed my cheek testily, looking at Sally as she stood like an angry goddess. My face hurt, yet I had never seen her looking so beautiful, like a Hawaiian volcano deity. Her beauty made me even angrier, for some odd reason.
Her lips were the color of pomegranates. “Tell me.” Her voice was dead with anger.
“No.” I said.
“Tell me!” She ordered.
“No.”
She pushed me. I fell backwards, completely shocked. Was this Sally? Was this the woman I had just married 4 months ago, who had driven from the doctor’s office yesterday in quiet tears so as to not get too worked up? She kicked me in my side with a pointed toe.
Deep inside my head, a little voice was whispering that Sally wasn’t being abusive on purpose. She was just releasing all that stressful anger that had accumulated at the doctors when she discovered that what was happening to her had happened to all the women of her family. When she realized that what she had was what killed a majority of her ancestors, too, her whole outlook must have twisted.
I got up slowly and looked her in the eye. I placed my hand on her shoulder lovingly, proud of myself for my self-control. “Sally, honey, this is for the best. That’s why I can’t tell you. Because I love you.”
She slapped me again. I opened my mouth, but she beat me to it. “Tell me, Daniel! If I had known what a pompous asshole you’d been before I’d married you, I never would have said ‘yes’!”
Something inside of me snapped. I was surprised it wasn’t an audible sound.
I said, slowly, “Okay, Sally. You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. We won the lottery.” She stared at me, her eyes like the moon. She had never looked so foolish. I continued.
“We won 42 million dollars after taxes. We one the big one, Sally. We’re rich.” My voice was calm with rage.
Slowly, as the amount dawned on her like the light from a sunrise, Sally began to smile, then grin, then her face blossomed with happiness as she began to jump up and down, screaming and crying the amount of money over and over again.
“42 million dollars! 42 million dollars! Oh, Daniel!”
She kissed me full on the lips just as I noticed how gray her face was. I recalled the words from the doctor. He had looked uncomfortable when he said them. That clued me in that he had discovered something...unpleasant.
“Now, Mr. O’Connor, Mrs. O’Connor. I don’t know how to tell you this. Apparently, this is a trait common in your heritage, Mrs. O’Connor. It seems to only show up around the age of thirty and last for around a year or two, which is extremely odd since we cannot discover what triggers this reaction to intense emotion. You told me earlier that this was how both your aunt and your great-grandmother died, although you weren’t certain exactly as to how. I find it remarkable that the rest of your family is still alive.”
He picked up a tissue sample that he had collected from my wife, earlier. “Now, I’m going to flow a mild electrical current into the tissue to simulate the brain’s response to emotional excitement. Watch what happens.” With that, he placed a thin, metal rod with a rubber handle into the tissue. Slowly, the red color began to fade into a dark gray mass that sloshed in the test tube like water. What was once a piece of my wife now spilled into a container marked BIOHAZARD as Sally burst into tears.
“Shush.” The doctor said in interested concern. “Let’s not do that, okay?” That brief flashback boxed my mind as I watched Sally watching me watching her. Her skin was completely gray now and small beads of what looked like discolored perspiration dripped off of her face and onto the floor. Tiny indentations appeared on her flesh, like dimples. And then her face was covered with them.
I tried to cry out as I realized what my words had done to her. I had killed her, I realized. That thought crashed through my brain and I felt like going into the kitchen and taking a knife like Oedipus and cutting my eyes out for what I had done. However, I couldn’t leave her side as I watched my wife melt into oblivion.
Her eyes have run droplets into the carpet, which soaked her up eagerly. Large bubbles began to burst from inside of her head as the matter slowly melted into gray water. A odor fills the room, smelling strongly of iron and menstrual blood and sulfur.
I began to wail her name inside my head. All I could hear was my breathing and the sound of bubbles. I leaned forward and tried to wrap my arms around her body, but as I circled my arm behind her back, her spine liquefied and her body broke in half.
I tried to scream, but the odor of her death choked my lungs and I began to cough, eyes watering. As I struggled to breathe, a single thought filtered through my brain; What will be left to bury?. Without realizing it, I burst into self-hating tears.
A final bubble popped as I wept and then the silence took me by surprise. There was no sound in the room. I looked at the gray stain on the white carpet and recalled her voice, her face. It was all there, somewhere between the carpet and the floorboards. Her face... Instead of crumpling to the floor as my body so desired, I got up and walked jaggedly into kitchen where the knives were kept. There was something that I needed to do.
