Suicide Note
She practices his
signature. Tight loops, more like the output from a demented ECG than
the cursive hand of an architect. What right has it to be illegible?
Is it because of the careful block lettering on his drawings of
houses and the recreation area between two blocks of flats, where
kids are supposed to find amusement in old chip wrappers and
discarded needles, and never mind the falling Budweiser bottles from
the seventeenth floor. If the kids weren't brained outright they
suffered explosions of translucent green shards sharp enough to peel
the skin from their faces.
She scrawls his name
over and over, filling the yellow pages of a legal pad with
signatures of every size. Pages and pages of mnemonic scribbles.
After an hour her loops become lighter, more fluid. After two hours
she stops seeing the letters in her head, trusting her cramped
fingers to respond to muscle memory. After three hours she signs the
document.
His body is already
cool to the touch, the incisions along his wrist bloodless valleys
along the lines of his arteries. She dips a corner of the document in
red-stained water, just enough to smudge the date, wraps his fingers
around the pen.
His was the selfish
act, his desire to be with the women he loved outweighing his
responsibility to his fourteen year old daughter.
At least she'll get to
keep the house, now.
2 comments:
:)
Your characters always have courage we mere mortals lack. I love that.
I wish I had her corage. Or his.
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