Reparation

By John Blase | September 5, 2012 |

Sometimes a short story wants to be a poem and vice versa…this is one that cannot make up its mind…for today, this is it.

It became a game the two of them played

every evening. She’d hurl verbal spears and

poisoned-tipped arrows directly at his chest

and he’d take each one, absorb them into

himself. He’d been taught never to hit a girl;

it was a lesson he simply could not unlearn,

even with her gauntlets of hit me back, you

bastard! Whaddaya think I can’t handle it?

He knew she couldn’t; he knew his power;

he could destroy her.

Once she wearied of throwing, he’d go for a

walk by himself, maybe take the dog and

let the gathering dusk ease him of those

bitter words. That game went on for

almost two years and then the children began

to come along – first twin girls and twenty

months later their only son. Whether they

were conceived in anger or resignation is

hard to say. But its safe to say she did not

carry them in love.

He took them all to the beach one summer,

their first time on the Oregon coast. The girls

were eight and the boy was six. As they hung on

his neck in the pounding surf, the boy noticed

tiny scars on his father’s chest, palpable evidence

as from some forgotten war. His daughters

surprised him with their statement: Mommy says

Daddy’s soft. He isn’t really tough enough

so she has to be. Then the girls swam back to

shore, to her.

He lingered with his son a little longer out there,

away from her sand-bound perspective. It wasn’t

minutes before his son said I don’t like Mommy.

It was then and there he realized it hadn’t been a

game and he loathed his cowardice, not for his

sake but for the sake of his son. He determined

to teach him never to turn a cheek he didn’t have,

that turning away wrath with gentleness was

proverbial gas. He would never destroy his wife, but

she would not devour his son.