Night To Remember

When you go in for the kill, some part of yourself leaves for good and won't ever return. Sometimes what comes back is a shadow from some distant past which one cannot even start to imagine.

I was bound by the wedlock and blackmailed by the murder that I had committed at the wedding in order to gain acceptance into a highly secretive and elite society here in town.

My wife - the one I no longer loved - lay lost in her own dreams, asleep on our bed, looking as if nothing in the world mattered shuffled her body against the wee hours.

I was thinking that perhaps I had not ever really loved her, but I knew that it could also be that I had not ever really loved anyone other than myself.

My television screen glimmered and seemed to smile as I pressed the remote and sat down to avoid the chains of marriage.

A woman was undressing and then she was dressing. This woman was not going out. She was going to bed and she looked intent on making love.

Her husband rattled at her caress and then railed at her wanton disposition exclaiming that they already had two children and he wasn't prepared to make any more.

It was an old film in black and white. A movie way beyond my time and yet there it was that shadowy voice from some distant past whispering...Shelly Winters. Robert Mitchum.

I went to sleep bent crooked right there on the couch, but when I got up and stirred the light of the internet wouldn't you know that it was them or so it said.

Night of the hunter.

Knowledge, present. Shadowy voice, absent.

In college, I had read Sylvia Plath yet I had not understood any of her writing until this moment when the question could be positioned, what am I that these late mouths should open...

And the response, well, it is so dreadful that one cannot even start to imagine.