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The Anniversary |
| Written by P.C. Atwell | |
| Thursday, 05 June 2008 | |
The time was a quarter after midnight when Suzan walked in the house. She walked straight from the entryway to the kitchen without even noticing that I was sittin at the dining room table. It had been set for two and our wedding candle had been burning for hours, now it was barely a nub in the wax covered candle stick. This scenario had been played almost every weekend for the past three months now. I could recite every move she made with my eyes closed. She opened the refridgerator and pulled out my last beer. It hissed in disdain as the cap was pried from it's sweating, glass neck. She swallowed two large gulps, then opened the cabinet next to the refridgerator. Her back was turned to me the whole time, but I knew what she was looking for. She rummaged through the medicine container, the asprin bottle rattled as she picked it up to see if it was the bottle she was looking for. It wasn't. Next she pulled out the step stool to search through the upper shelves, incase it had been placed there by accident, but it wasn't there either. As she step off the stool, her eyes fell on what she had been looking for. A bottle of over-the-counter sleeping pills. I had laid a couple pills on the counter, with a glass of water to wash them down with. She started only taking two a few months ago, but lately she had been taking four. "Its just too hard for me to sleep." she told me once, "I've always had trouble sleeping, even as a little girl." Her hands opened the child-proof bottle with ease. The bottle rattled as she shook pills into her hand, then swept the pills on the counter into her hand and swallowed them all with a couple more swigs from the beer. She replaced the sleep-aids to the medicine bin, dumped the water in the sink and finished off the last of my beer and left the bottle on the counter as a reminder to me to buy more beer. Suzan turned to go up to bed and saw me at the table, intently watching her. "Oh, geeze Tom! You scared the living hell out of me!" She said and gave a momentary look of perplexion to the table settings then pretended like she never saw them. "Sorry babe. Where have you been? It's kinda late?" "The girls at work wanted to go out for drinks." "Ah..." "Yeah, well I've got a headache so I'm just going to go straight to bed." And she started for the stairs behind me. As she passed she stopped momentarily to give me a good night kiss but changed her mind in the same instant. I might smell the some other man's cologne on her. The same scent she has been comming home with for the past months. When I asked her about it, she just said that she was looking for expensive colognes to buy me for our anniversary. I knew that scent though. It wasn't expensive at all. it was a five dollar bottle of Old Spice any schmuck can pick up at the grocery store. The same faint smell that, tonight, wafted to my nose in her moment's hesitation. After she had gone to bed and I could her her breathing ease into a drug-induced state of unconciousness, I got up from the table and walked into the kitchen. I opened the cupboard and pulled out the bottle of sleep-aids. The bottle that less than ten minutes ago was half empty, now rattle with only a few loose pills. It was then I knew that tonight would be her last late night with the excuse of drinks with her girlfriends, but secretly smelling of another man's cheap cologne. I threw the empty bottle of beer and grabbed my keys so I could drive to the store. There I would buy another six pack of beer and a bottle of Old Spice. At the funeral, I'll place the bottle in her hands, then watch as an unknown man, reeking of the same stench, looks uneasily at the bottle in her lifeless hands and then into my knowing eyes. Copyright 2008 P.C. Atwell |
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