Rusty Spoon

“Sometimes I want to gut you with a rusty spoon, but then I reflect how that would be a waste of a rusty spoon,” he said from behind the morning’s paper. He had to force the words around his most likely illegal cigar to make completely sure that they hit their target. 

The girl didn’t even flinch. She hadn’t in years; not when he threw words or firsts or various inanimate objects. Biting her tongue had become second-nature.

And so had counting.

Three. Just three now. 

Three days until her eighteenth birthday. Three days until, unbeknownst to her father, she received the inheritance that he never intended her to have.  

She wondered if he would get a kick out of the fact that his own demise was going to be inspired by his own myriad of colorful suggestions. It was a pittance, really, the extra five grand that her new associate required to spice up his usual methods of operation. 

Fortunately for her father, though, even a contract killer felt that rusty spoons were too gruesome a mode of dispatchment. 

Pity. 

Haiku #28: I Want You to Be Happy

I can respect your 

Wishes even if they do 

Interfere with mine. 

Haiku #27: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

You, sir, are more of

A drama queen than any

Girl I’ve ever met.

Haiku #26: Self-Acceptance

Being that one that’s

Not as pretty is not as

Horrid as you’d think. 

Haiku #25: The One

I look for you at

Every turn, but I’m afraid

That you don’t exist.

Haiku #24: Introspection

I use the word “I”

Too many times in a day.

Lord, make me selfless. 

Lullaby

I am in love with his words. I want to hold them to my chest and let them sing me to sleep even though lullabies were never really my thing.

They’re not mine. They belong to some nameless girl on some nameless street with bluer eyes and blonder hair; the picture of perfection. I only borrow them from time to time.

But that’s okay. Loving a person takes time. Loving words takes an instant.

So all that I need is a little bit of time to play pretend; to slip into the shoes of a girl that I’ll probably never meet and fall finally, blissfully asleep.

Price

When all of this is said and done, they will laud the crown atop my head and pretend to forget the scars that mar every other piece of me.

Scars can only hold their beauty for so long before they wake you up in the middle of the night to remind you of how they got there.

But in the waking moments, you do your best to hide them; these physical manifestations of the ghosts that you wish would just stay dead.

No one else cares to acknowledge them, so why should I?

Caffeine

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with the squeal of tires as my best friend and my girlfriend peel out of the driveway and head off towards their new life together somewhere at the other end of I-475. I should be devastated, furious, heartbroken, but all that I can think about is how thirsty I am, and how my now ex-girlfriend sipped calmly on our last Dr. Pepper as she told me, without batting an eyelash, that she had been sleeping with Ben Fullard for the last three months.

Apparently, refusing sex until marriage wasn’t gentlemanly. It was withholding.

And now I need a strong drink.

Not beer. I don’t do beer, not since Robbie died. Never again. But I could go for a coffee. Black. Just the way Christi didn’t like it. Just the way I didn’t know I liked it, either, until she told me that I wouldn’t.

That, of course, made me want to try it.

The more that I thought about it, the more that our whole relationship seemed like a contest:always trying to one-up each other, and the final test was seeing which one of us would hold out longest. Or, on the flip side, which one would crack and do something unforgivable first.

It was a wonder that Christi held out this long.

I should be upset right now.

Shouldn’t I?

Screw it. I’d decide when I was caffeinated.

Parallels

“It’s like I always say: never trust something that bleeds for a week out of every month and lives to complain about it every go-round,” the man growled into the receiver. He chuckled at his own joke, quick and deep, before repositioning the stogie dangling between his teeth and calling gruffly into the kitchen, “My sandwich ready yet, babe?” 

“Just a minute, hon!” his wife trilled back cheerfully after adding her personal favorite ingredient from the unmarked bottle that she kept in the very back of her spice rack. 

Later that night, she reflected that the telephone receiver would probably always smell like cigar smoke, so she should probably invest in a new one. “It’s just like you always say,” she told her sister, a recent widow and sandwich-making extraordinaire, “Some men just can’t hold their arsenic. Now I hate to rush off, but I can hear the sirens already and I don’t look nearly distraught enough over my dear, departed husband.”