Her

It was the pearl anklet dangling from her leg as her limp body was picked up and placed on the stretcher that did it to him. It hypnotized him. It reminded him of her. He didn’t want to think about her, not on the job. He tried to see while not seeing. He chewed and spat the image out of his head. The Virgin Mary memory in his mind’s eye might have been heaven on Earth, but what lay before him was a nightmare. He stared into somebody else’s hell and tried not to feel the sorrow that choked him; the sorrow that rose from his esophagus begging to be expelled on to God’s Green Earth.

That sorrow spilled onto the lawn. He choked up the chickpea recipe his ex-wife had made him for dinner that night; choked them up -right on top of somebody else’s green turf. Not God’s.

He stared at them instead of the anklet. Stared at their beige round pods. Looked at them like they were letters, spelling out her name. He couldn’t save her. He couldn’t save the woman on the stretcher either. Since everyone was screwed anyways, he looked once more at the anklet, then turned his head back down and stared at his expulsion. The garbanzo beans in tomato sauce resembled the head slaughter of the woman whose body was now being zipped up and wheeled into the back of the ambulance.

I’m sorry, he screamed inside his head. “I am sorry,” he coughed, expelling once more onto the grass.

“Pussy,” Roger said, slapping his back.

He stood up wiping the corners of his mouth.

“Fuck you, Roger.”

He spat the bad taste of dinner and bile from his mouth as they walked together toward the ambulance where the dead body laid inside.