Flash Fiction

DEAD IN BIG SKY

by

Rick B. Honey
 

I'm healed now, physically at least. There's a crescent-shaped scar, like a pink worm on my chest where he slashed me. The headaches are gone, but I can still feel the hard scar tissue at the base of my skull where they put the tube in. Lucky to be alive.

It was a scandal in our suburban town. Headlines in all the papers. Even made the Times, inside on the Metro section. Sordid business, really, like I was playing with fire at the edge of a gas spill. And I was the one who lit the match--or was I? Damn near dead from it, and sometimes I wish I were. That too is a constant battle. But the move helped, sitting here amid the majesty of the Bitterroot Range. Quite fitting, that name.

I remember the vodka, the stinging sharpness in my throat and then driving up there, to the house. My house. Seeing them together, Suzanne and Mercer. His hand up her skirt when I walked through the door. Then it only comes back in unconnected images. The boning knife. My rage. Like a thunder roar inside my head. Him. That plaid shirt. My blood on the green grass even though I don't remember how we got outside onto the front lawn. Suzanne crying hysterically. Alex, there suddenly from school, pulling at Mercer. Alex, my son, trying to help me, crying for Mercer to stop. The redness of the blood--drops glistening on that green blade of grass, bending it down toward the earth. I could hear screams but was falling into a darkness, into a deep coldness within myself. I tried to pull myself up, saw the sun reflecting in the drops of blood when something fell against me and I lost consciousness.

She told me what happened but I still can't piece it all together. My mind hasn't, or won't, accept her version as part of the flashing images I can still see. It's a matter of trust. She said Mercer picked up the knife but it's not in my memory.

The doctors said I lost a lot of blood. I was in intensive care for three days, and I remember opening my eyes a few times. Warm humming, cotton mouth, beeps from machines in the dim light, a green glow. Feeling the tube in my nose and in my arms, dripping nourishment and anti-infectives and painkiller into my veins. My arms were tied down so I wouldn't pull at the plastic tubing hanging from their silvery metal trees, like sad willows feeding me.

I remember the glare of the white walls of the hospital room after they wheeled me out of ICU. The sun was harsh and hurt my eyes and the doctors and nurses came and went. Cold, except for one young doctor, a devout Christian. When I was discharged, he gave me a smooth stone shaped like a cross and told me to stay out of knife fights; it didn't become a 45-year-old corporate lawyer.

I wonder how it all became so entangled. We were three, Suzanne, Alex and me. The house, the dog, the station wagon. Right in the middle of our dream and it wasn't enough. And Alex knew. He knew the seams had begun to split and he was worried. I think he knew about Mercer too, maybe before I did. That must have been a lot for a 13-year-old to bear. I know it's an awful feeling to think that you're not enough for your mate. That I was away so often that she needed someone else. But I wasn't surprised, the warmth had emptied out, like my blood onto the earth. And I became cold.

Mercer is in jail. Suzanne never discusses him. She saw something terrible. Alex tried to help me, and Mercer cut him. He died next to me in the grass.

We're here now. We like the mountains, the openness of the sky. She will leave one day. Or, I will.