"Closer Than They Appear" by Cary Rainey

Three months after Melanie Amber was born, Danny told me he was moving out.  He told me about his new house where he was going to start his new life and then he walked out and left me alone and I curled up on the floor in a corner of the kitchen.

Melanie hadn’t been the solution to anything.

The steering wheel feels very heavy now.  My fingers are wrapped tightly around the wheel, but it feels like the damn thing’s being dragged right down to the bottom of the car and although I’ve never been there, I have the clearest memory of the three of us standing on a blanket at the beach, Danny holding Melanie, and we’re looking out at the ocean.  This is followed by the very real memory of Danny and me riding on the back of a horse at a farm in Tennessee.  I see Danny standing over me by the side of the bed and he’s still dripping from his shower and he’s wearing his towel around his waist, and he’s holding me by my wrists and there’s blood running out from between his fingers, and he looks angry and he’s shouting but I can’t hear what he’s saying, and I see him and that other boy coming out of the convenience store and walking to the little grey foreign car and I’m sitting in my foreign car with the engine running, and I’ve been waiting for him to come out of the store and I watch them get into the little grey foreign car and back out of their parking space, and I drop the gear shift into DRIVE and I ease forward and I follow them to the house, but there’s ice all over the road, and I see myself in the bathtub and in the bed and curled up in the corner of the kitchen and I have something shiny in my hand, and I keep touching it to my inner forearms and to the tops of my thighs, and I’m bleeding all over the place and sometimes I’m laughing and sometimes I’m crying and what the fuck does it matter anyway because we’re all going to die anyway, and if it’s not from being shot or from falling off a building or from being blown up or from AIDS it won’t matter because the sun’s going to explode one day and burn us all to Kingdom Come and nothing matters anyway, and I see my bare feet against the dark wood of the floor in the hallway and I’m standing outside Melanie’s bedroom, and I’m looking into the room and the house is quiet and my steps are slow and light and graceful and I’ve run out of ideas, and I’ve really looked at this every way possible and I see another brief reflection of light on the ice, and the ice covers at least half of the overpass, and I can hear myself breathing but I think it’s Melanie’s breathing that I hear and I can see her lying in her crib and she’s on her stomach with her face turned toward the door, and her hands are balled up into little fists, and Danny is in his new fucking house where he’s started his new fucking life and the court has spoken and he’s in for such a surprise he just doesn’t even know because when I knock on his door I’m going to turn Melanie over to him, but I’m going to have another surprise for his sorry ass too and it’s going to make me so Garfucking happy to give it to him, and to see the look on his face when he realizes what a fucking retarded asshole he is and what he’s responsible for and how much he’s just getting what’s coming to him anyway and how he doesn’t deserve to be a winner because all he fucking deserves is to lose and lose and lose. 

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