One
Margaret
He’s hitting me again.
“What did I say, Margaret? I said cheese sandwich. I didn’t say cheese and pickle sandwich.” Mark's face is contorted with petty rage. A broken plate lies in thousands of shattered shards across the cheerful sunshine colored kitchen tile. We picked the tile out together. He smiled so nicely and told the sales representative that I could have whatever I liked because I was the boss, of the kitchen at least. They both laughed at that.
“I thought you might like…”
The sandwich comes sailing by my head, still encased in the gay wax paper I wrapped it in. He hasn't even unwrapped it. I wonder how he senses the pickle of his dissatisfaction between thick slices of homemade bread. My husband is a sensitive man. A rage-filled, sensitive man.
His face is twisted in anger. He’s been drinking. He’s always been drinking. Before we married, he wouldn't have any more than a beer shandy on Sunday evenings. Now he drinks every night at the office with the other advertising representatives.
Neither one of us noticed the front door shattering open. Mark’s screaming rage covered the sound almost entirely. He still hasn’t noticed.
I feel a brief pulse of hope at the notion it might be the police. Then I remember the police don't care. Nobody does. The entire block can hear how Mark goes on at me. I am sure they, like I, believe that Mark would stop if only I would be a better wife.
“It’s because you insist on working!” he hollers at me. "If you were a good wife, you would stop wasting your time and pay more attention to what you need to do here to look after me.”
“I will quit my job when we have children.”
"We won't have children until you can stop being such a lousy, slovenly excuse for a housewife!”
If Mark had any idea what the slim circle of plastic in my handbag really was, he would be so furious I do not think he would survive it. I take one of the little pills every day without my husband’s knowledge, and against his wishes. It is my one rebellion. My one strand of sanity.
Mark’s eyes widen. I fear that he has found some new trespass about which to freak. Something over my shoulder. Something which makes him turn more pale than ever, and which sends his pupils from two angry dots to wide saucers.
“What the fuck… Margaret! Get behind me!”
He seeks to protect me, in the midst of attacking me. This is the contradiction of a bad marriage. It has so many of the elements of a good one, but they are all twisted up and scarred. There are holes in them where feet and fists have found their way through, patched over with belated apologies and a mutual unspoken agreement to let it all happen. Again. And again.
Mark grasps my wrist and pulls me roughly toward him before pushing me back against the kitchen sink.
We have just run out of happenings. This will be our last fight. Ever. In the doorway stands something that is surely not here to rescue me. It is a demon of some kind. Or an alien? Why does that word leap to mind? It does not have big dark eyes and spindly appendages. It is a massive, pale, muscular beast with the biggest, sharpest teeth you ever saw—all the better to eat you with, my dears.
I am stunned into silence. He is so very nearly human, and yet completely inhuman. He has the most fabulous dark hair cascading from his head in thick warrior braids. He glows beneath the skin, as though it were powered by some internal battery. He is staring at us with golden eyes which are so inhumanly beautiful I feel as though I could fall into them for an eternity. There is a brief moment in which I imagine this may be my guardian angel incarnate.
There have been many times I wished some kind of divine intervention existed in the universe. Mark's temper has only worsened over months of marriage to the point I have been tempted to leave him, but what would I do? I have no skills, and a married woman who becomes unmarried by divorce is a shameful, pathetic creature. I swore to be faithful to Mark until death did us part.
“Have a baby,” my mother advised me. “Men always calm down once they become fathers. It’s foolproof.”
She forgets how it was for her, but I have not forgotten how it was for me, growing up in a household full of silence and shouting, two alternate terrors each as bad as the one before.
I stare at this strange creature, feeling all those petty concerns being washed away by his oddness. This thing. This man. This male creature of ultimate strangeness should not be here.