Poisoning Barry

t took longer for him to die than I thought, lying there gulping air like a fish, fracturing it back out in little puffs. He sprawled in the middle of the room, the balloon of bloody vomit painting a cloud around his cocked head. I stood over him, wanting my face to be the last thing he saw. He stared past me at nothing.

I gripped his baseball bat in case he got up, like they do in the movies, but he didn't move, only pulled at the carpet with his fingers. I was waiting for him to call me bitch one last time so it would give me the reason to finish him off, get in that rusted wreck of a Gremlin he'd won in a poker game and drive off. Be free of him at last. Eleven years of this, eleven years.

His lips curled when I leaned over him. His eyes fixed on the ceiling as if I wasn't there, like when he'd fuck me, and then he exhaled the stink of death and whisky and formed, do it, with his bloody lips. Then his eyes turned to pleading as the poison dug in its claws.

I knelt down next to him as the pain telegraphed across his body, twisting him up like a broken doll. This is what you did to me, I wanted to say, this is how you broke me down, I'm on your level now, Barry. I wanted him to hurt, wanted him to understand what pain was, but it didn't stop. Ten minutes, fifteen, a lifetime he writhed across the carpet like a tragic snake.

It wasn't enough, I feared, he'd live through it and the police would come and that would be the end. They'd put me in jail, arrest me for trying to kill my husband, never knowing the years he took from me. The fucking bastard would have his last laugh, ruin my life even after I got away, get me inside where he'd never reached before. It couldn't… I couldn't.

The bat connected with the carpet near his head and came away sticky with his vomit. The second hit smacked his skull and the third and the fourth and then I stopped counting, just hitting back, getting him back, getting him behind me.

 

My arms ached as I sat across the room, smoking one of his cigarettes and letting the ashes drift into the carpet. I couldn't move, a prisoner of my new freedom, afraid that when I turned my back he would get up like when he was loaded and come after me, get me where I couldn't see. No. Not again.

I let the cigarette drop into the carpet and watched it smolder there, smoke, flame. He'd prepared me for it. I held my breath for eternity as warmth took me and held me safe.

 

Melissa sees reality in fiction and fiction in reality, "but you can control fiction". She would rather watch Sesame Street with her daughter, Samantha, then any adult programming because of its honesty. She writes when she has time.