A Husband’s Last Letter

I have a story to tell, and it will be my last, so please read carefully. If you’re lucky you might be able to avoid my situation, and mine is a situation you will never want to find yourself in. It started five years ago when Mary and I married, but the focus of this story is the last three weeks.

I guess I should give some background first. Mary and I were married the 2nd of June 1998. The first couple years were the happiest of our lives. We were a 60’s TV couple. We had our occasional squabbles and disagreements, but I can’t remember us ever having a real fight. That ended roughly two years into the relationship. You see; this is when we decided to have children. We were so happy we figured it was time to share our happiness with another life. Forgive the cliché, but we were fucking like jackrabbits. After a few months of being unable to conceive we became worried. We didn’t understand how with all our efforts we couldn’t conceive, but teenage girls could spread their legs once, and get pregnant. We tried everything from positions recommended by hippy looking sexual counselors to special diets. We planned intercourse by what doctors told us were the paramount times to conceive. However, nothing could put a bun in her oven. In the end we discovered my dough was less then gourmet.

This is when the relationship changed. She resented me. She treated me as if I was withholding a child from her purposefully. Her temper with me shortened every day until it was no longer a fuse, but a tripwire, and no matter where I stepped I managed to set it off. I tried to remain understanding, I really did. I bowed down to her every whim. After all, it was sort of my fault, even if I couldn’t help it. However, it didn’t help. I thought it was as bad as our marriage could get.

However, I was wrong, very wrong. It became worse when she started getting more involved in her little social circles. She would be out late every night. Sometimes tell 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning. At first I ignored it. She was just at Tupperware parties and church groups. How could I feel threatened by that? Finally, the old fashioned man in me decided to lay down the law. That was a mistake. It was as if I had arrogantly strolled up to the summit of Mount Olympus, pissed on the gate, and felt the wrath of the gods.

I don’t feel as though I was unreasonable in my requests. All I asked was she be at home by ten, and maybe think about staying home a little more. The former request went totally unacknowledged, but at least she stayed home a few nights a week. Problem was; so did all her friends.

I became an alien in my own home. I can, to this moment, see the way they looked at me. I was a little boy at a bachelorette party; an annoyance. That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the whispers that drifted from the dining room as they giggled under their breaths, sounding like thirteen-year-old schoolgirls. They were the types of whispers in which you can’t decipher the words, but know they’re menacing, and meant for you.

They were mostly single besides my Mary, and acted as if they were recruiting members of some secret organization. I know they were the reason Mary decided to leave me, their lavish stories of endless unwed freedom, and horror tales of the evil that is man.

It all culminated three weeks ago. That’s when Mary casually informed me she wanted a divorce. I can’t say I was surprised. Actually I had expected it sooner or later, but none the less it didn’t fail to break me. For three years I had been dragged around by the hair, kicked, and spit on just to be tossed away.

She gathered her belongings, most of which were mine. She packed them into her car, which I made payments on, and drove away. She moved in with one of her single friends; a pretty girl about twenty-three with long black hair and tattoos, whom still enjoyed a wild life style.

I watched my spouse from the shadows. I felt ridiculous dressed in all black crouching behind parked cars and stinking garbage cans across the street from her new home. I stalked my own wife; saw her doing things I hadn’t seen her do since we had dated as teenagers. She would get wasted every night; she and the rest of her secret single society.

I don’t know how long I would have gone on following around my wife, who had become someone I didn’t know, but it stopped for me last night. Last night I saw her have sex with another man. They were in the thick of another one of their drunken parties, and I had watched her flirt with him all night. He was tall and well-built with long brown hair running down to his shoulders; a straight off the police lineup kind of guy. He looked as though he hadn’t shaved in weeks, or bathed for that matter, but she flirted with him.

Then they went into a back room and had sex. I crept to the bedroom window, not really wanting to, but not able to stop myself, and watched through a crack in lavender curtains. It was wild sex, nothing like Mary and I ever had, and she seemed to enjoy it. I couldn’t blame her; we hadn’t had sex in a year, which was evident in the way she attacked, and she was attacking; a starved beast and penis her prey. I decided that was the end, the end of our relationship (I still had foolish notions of reconciliation), and the end of following her around. It was the end of everything.

Tonight I went to their never-ending party as an uninvited guest, but at least I brought party favors. A shiny new axe from Jim’s hardware store, and a .44 revolver I got from my dad when he passed away. I can still see the look in that young girl's eyes as she opened the door to catch ten pounds of sharpened metal in her forehead. I’ve never been one for parties, but I livened that one up quick. I swung, and swung until my arms went numb. By then I had chopped my way through three single women, and one longhaired unshaven man. I pulled the revolver and created a cave through the torso of a chubby blonde woman as she ran screaming into the kitchen. That left Mary according to the quick headcount I had taken through the window minutes before.

I cased the bottom floor, kicking in doors axe in hand, but she was nowhere to be found. I slowly climbed the stairs letting the axe dangle and bounce off every step on the way. As I reached the second floor the ambient sound of romantic music drifted into my ears. It was muffled, but loud enough to let me know whoever was left upstairs had been kept oblivious to the happenings downstairs.

I became puzzled. Why would Mary be upstairs listening to loud romantic music away from the party by herself? Before I could finish asking myself the question the answer struck me, leaving me breathless. She was with another man. I had left the grungy line-up man’s head hanging on by a string of skin, so how could she be? I found out soon enough.

There was no need for the kicking of doors, or readying of axe, I simply walked towards the music. I stopped in front of the bedroom door not knowing if I wanted to see what was on the other side, but I had come too far. I kicked the door in and gripped my axe until my knuckles whitened.

There she was. On her back, legs in the air, as some kid slowly pumped to his heart’s content. He couldn’t have been more then eighteen. Her head rocked back and forth rhythmically with the boy’s steady thumping. Her face wrapped in the pinnacle of euphoria. My anger grew into a rage I had never felt before.

Her euphoria ended, as her eyes half opened just in time to watch her new friend’s cranium split like an eggshell. It was as if a grenade had exploded in the boy’s head. A small milky skull fragment struck her face. Needless to say, she let out the loudest scream I ever heard. It made my ears ring, and easily drowned out Barry Manilow, or whoever’s music that was.

I had made a pact with myself, as I had knocked on the door in the beginning, that I would show no mercy, and I made good on my word. Reaching down to grab a handful of her long brown hair, I jerked that bitch off her back, and slammed her face first into the brown shag carpet. I plunged a foot into her ribcage, and felt bones collapse inwards. I kicked again, rolling her onto her back. A cough escaped her throat followed by streams of blood, black in the darkness of the room.

I brought my axe down into the center of her forehead. The image of a Gallagher show flooded my imagination, and turned my stomach. I made an attempt to hold back the torrent of vomit building in my throat, but it failed. It poured from my mouth, splashing on her face, which caused another convulsion in my gut.

I plan on putting one last bullet in my head.