The Confession

She wanted me to hug her. And next thing I know — I swear I didn’t plan it — I’m feeling the blade cut through her T-shirt, and the skin and flesh of her back, and then slip between her ribs, and, this might sound crazy, but I could sense when the tip of the blade pierced the membrane of her heart. That satisfying tension-tension-pop you get like when a salmon egg bursts between your teeth. I held her by the shoulders so I could watch those eyes go from shocked to scared to pleading to drifting to empty. All in a few seconds. I checked in with myself to see how I felt. Out of habit, I guess. 

You want to know how I felt? I felt alive.

But let me back up a little. 

I’ve always been what you’d call a normal guy. Your proverbial productive member of society. Job, house, wife, kids — the whole nine. Never even got pulled over for speeding.

My evolution, as I call it, started with a small act. I guess it was about a year ago. I stopped by Bountiful Pantry on the way home from work. Jen, that’s my wife, was working nights at Mercy, and so I was on dinner duty. KP. Tonight was pasta puttanesca. What can I say — my kids aren’t picky. I scanned the shelves for olives; threw a jar in the basket. Now for the anchovies; the oval tin fit nicely in my blazer pocket. 

I paid for the groceries, minus the anchovies, and walked to the car, one hand holding the handles of the paper bag and the other hand in my pocket so I could hold the can. As I buckled up, I checked in with myself to see if I felt guilty about stealing something. It was actually the opposite. I felt amazing. Giddy and relieved — like I found something important I thought I’d lost forever. I know! Such a stupid little thing!

So, those next few days, I felt so much more normal. Like actually normal, not fake-normal. Like when I talked to my wife, I was really talking to her. Or when the kids were around, I realized, as if for the first time, that they were people, real people, with their own minds and their own personalities. I remember we talked about how they were nervous and excited about going back to school after Labor Day, which was coming up. When I took the dog out, I noticed how the setting sun lit the clouds from underneath, creating these beautiful lavenders and grays. I never really saw something like that before.

Well, that little epiphany — it faded away. And when it did, I felt more dead inside than before. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, you could say. I could still go through the motions and be fake-normal. I’ve always been able to do that. But inside? It was just empty emptiness, a big nothing.

Well, except I did have this craving. You ever get that craving? I wanted to feel that spark of real-normal again. I tried looking up at the sky. Clouds. Big deal. I felt like an idiot. I went back to avoiding Jen, which was easy, given our schedules. We mostly communicated by text anyway. Don’t forget to leave a check for the babysitter. Make sure Sam finishes ALL his homework. What do we need from Bountiful?

So the bird thing was around Halloween — I remember because everyone had their decorations up, skeletons and such, and fake cobwebs that look nothing like cobwebs. The bird was one of those gray dove-looking things. You know what I’m talking about? Not a pigeon. Prettier than a pigeon. Anyway, one was on my driveway, just sitting there, as I was pulling in. I came in slowly to give it time to fly away. But it just sat there. Maybe its leg was broken or something? Maybe it was stunned? It was definitely alive because it cocked its head a few times, I guess to check out the car coming. But it just sat there. So I just kept crawling up. And then I aimed my left front tire toward it. I got closer and closer, and still it didn’t move. So I just drove over it. Very slow, so I could feel — almost hear —the soft crunch of those hollow bones under the weight of my front wheel. I didn’t look at it when I got out of the car. What bird? But I did notice how good the fallen leaves and woodsmoke smelled. 

So it kind of went on like that for a while. Stealing and other stupid stuff. Like my daughter’s hamster. She had two hamsters, Salt and Pepper. But after Salt died, Pepper went crazy. Just going around and around that wheel for hours, like it was training for the hamster Olympics. Ellie was somewhere with a friend or something, so I went into her room to check on the hamster. It was going nuts on the wheel, rattling around and around. I opened the top of the cage and put my fingers on the wheel to stop it. The hamster kept trying to get the wheel going again, all frantic. Then it started scampering around the cage and it took some doing to catch ahold of it. But I caught it. I took it out of the cage. I held on to its little tube body real tight so it couldn’t bite me. I remember its body felt warmer than I’d expected. It looked like corn dog, the way my fist was wrapped around it, its little head poking out top. I tightened my grip, squeezing tighter and tighter, until I could feel its insides start to compress. I felt some little pops. It couldn’t breathe and its little black eyes started to bulge out, I was squeezing so hard. I knew someone might walk in, but I didn’t stop squeezing. I couldn’t stop squeezing.

“It must have died of exhaustion,” I told Ellie later. Her eyes filled with tears, and I actually felt a little sorry for her. “They do that, you know, when their friend dies. They get so sad sometimes they just kill themselves.” 

How did I feel about it? I know this sounds weird — I’m not an idiot — but I’ll be perfectly honest with you. I still like thinking about what it was like to squeeze that hamster. What it was like to make it die.

So yeah, it was stuff like that. One of the feral cats on my block, stealing stuff from the store — that kind of thing. It feels weird to hear myself talking about it. But you seem to get where I’m coming from. 

Okay. I guess we have to talk about the big one. This what happened. 

Jen was upset. One of those what-is-the-point-of-my-life, is-this-all-there-is kind of thing. We were in the kitchen, super early in the morning. It was still dark out. She was just home from her shift and, for whatever reason, I was up earlier than normal. She was leaning against the counter, and I was cutting open a bag of dog food with a kitchen knife. Anyway, she was spilling her guts. Like, she was always tired, working nights was so draining, she didn’t have any energy for the kids, her supervisor had been giving her shit about something that was the supervisor’s fault. All that kind of stuff. On and on. 

Finally, she stopped and she looked at me, her face all sad.

“I need a hug,” she said.