Dress Rehearsal-revised

DRESS REHEARSAL
© Claudia MelGregory
626 words

Inappropriately bright and wrong.

The day seemed unreal.

I’m sorry.

He had rehearsed saying that for weeks. But everything was wrong. Wrong for the sky to be perfectly blue and the clouds haloed by sun.

It was supposed to be rainy and overcast.

He had to cleared his throat several times while making his way across the lawn. He saw her first. There was a moment of doubt. Maybe the clear skies had been an omen and he should have stayed home.

She hopped up when she saw him. Sprang up from the bench, like the pop-up weasel on that Internet game he liked to play—to stave off boredom while he counted the seconds, the minutes, the hours between refilling his glass.

Sunlight was not kind, aging her by spotlighting the fret lines and the dark-ringed eyes, swollen, red-rimmed.

Pale like a ghost. She’d gone white, a shocking contrast to the caramel tint of the skin, the moment before she’d seen him. Small. Terribly small, she seemed, diminished by horror. Her dress was crinkled, and unkempt. Her shoes mismatched, as though she’d dressed in a trance.

His eyes were bloodshot. His tongue, thick wool. But he’d bathed. His clothes, starched and neatly pressed. He wished he’d spent less time on his clothes, and hair. But it was supposed to have rained.

He wore the face of a man tormented by sins. And the storm would have made them equals, drenching his expensive suit, and ruining his designer shoes.

He’d been lucky. Gotten off easy. Knew some people downtown. Lab results had gotten lost. But his conscience held a gavel. And in his dreams, a jury had passed verdict.

She had not moved. Seemed incapable of standing on her own, she was so thin. He’d marked each day, escorted passed her, watching that tired face become gaunter. When he slept, he’d often dreamed of feeding her fattening foods, rich foods, spooning it into her mouth as though it were Gerber’s Baby gruel.

His slow pace, wobbly from broken sleep, had finally gotten him to her, eyes lowered. The others, those patting her shoulders, and drying her eyes, had scattered. Sweaty palms stained the legs of his silk pants.

“I’m sorry.” He said it in a hurry, nervous now that the momentous occasion of his first day of amends was upon him. It hadn't come out at all like he'd practiced. He couldn’t believe the courage it had taken to him to mutter a contraction plus a word. An significant sentence which meant everything to him. Nothing to her.

He cleared his throat. "What I did was a ter..."

Wild eyed, she reared back as though struck, leaped at him–hands clasped around his throat–taking them both to the ground with such force it tore the air from their lungs.

“Bastard!”

Her knees pinned him, pressing into the squashy flab of his gut. His fingernails clawed at frail hands strengthened by rage.

“Wait.” Wheezing, eyes bulging, he sucked in what he feared would be the last taste of oxygen.

This was not supposed to happen. He’d rehearsed. There would rain, soaking them both, creating tears for him. They would fall into each other’s arms, connected by grief and guilt. He would atone. He would make good.

“Bastard!”

She crushed his release and intake of breath. That single word her only vicious utterance, while throttling him and slamming his head repeatedly into the dirt.
Fat drops, hot, not his own, salted his face and burned his clouding eyes–falling from the twisted rictus of despair and wrath above him.

His gut began to ache, from her bony knees. And that he could spare a second to feel that insignificant discomfort, when making good had sealed his lungs, was a flicker of a marvel, and drove in the realness of that unrehearsed moment.

Atonement was not peaceful. Its voice was the anguished wail of a mother. Robbed of child. Its face was the ugly snarl of vengeance and grief.

He should have chosen another day.
Maybe he should have brought flowers...
...And passed up that second glass of Grand Marnier