el tramposo [parte uno]

The day the news was spread like squealing lightning siren fire, from eave to eave like dangling, dripping, darkened happenings beneath moist autumn streetlights, a woman came home to her husband. She found him lying naked on the cambric couch, drowning in his dreams, where dew gathered in his throat and children with eager eyes sucked the ends of honeysuckle blooms and stood nearby, leering. The steel kettle was feverish and whistling deliriously, reminiscent of the wailing of winds and whistle warning alarms as she pulled her tornado tennis shoes on and tried not to think about the threat of sickness, tried not to float away.


Sometimes in his subconscious he would play with fire trucks- not minuscule plastic trinkets, but bright red monsters with ladders like claws, swinging and swooping and soaring. But on this particular afternoon, with its tightly wound coating of humidity that kept the mosquitoes plump and greedy, his soul was trying to escape-and in its valiant thrash of struggle it was choking him, floundering legs kicking at his throat and licking him with flame like Midwest field grass fires.


In another life, at another time, he would wake up startled and soaked in his own sweat, and his wife would sit next to him in the darkening light of the living room and rest her hand on his stomach in concern. She knew what it felt like, sleep that strangles, and she would murmur into his ear, nose nestled into the coarse curls of sideburns there, and tell him,
"Sometimes I forget I'm looking at another person."


He would twist his position and realign himself with her, breathing beginning to recycle, and ask her in a voice guttural with extinction,
"What do you think you're looking at?"


"Myself."


But on this day, he would not awake yet, would keep himself suspended in the sludge of detox as he slept, slept restlessly like a child on the bright blue nap mats after recess and apple juice, and she padded quietly past to the kitchen to check the voice messages, feeling the mounting pressure of trepidation swarm her skin in prickles like something was beyond not right in the world. The birds weren't chirping. There was a deep and thickening silence like the static weight of underground, but with a barely concealed current of menace like the hot wired charge rumbling through the hollows of tall ceiling rods.


The air outside was boiling in such a way that made people forget, momentarily, their own names, and stumble through the darkness of the day.


And the woman found no red blinking light amidst the black plastic, but she found a hastily scribbled note on the purple sticky pad resting on the dining room table,


Call Joe


it read.


The woman felt a strangeness wash over her, and she picked up the cold cordless phone receiver and walked to the patio door window, drawing the blinds high and peering outside as the storm rolled in quicker like the unfurling spindly fingers lining God's palms. She hated the sound of dial tones and dialed the familiar number quickly; next door the new neighbors were watching a Wonder Years marathon, and the screen flickered across the grey outpourings of bloodclotted clouds, beckoning to her from the twilight zone of Janurary's dim.


Rain pellets suddenly blossomed across the clear panes before her eyes, picking up shards of shattered light like CMWK rainbow droplets of saliva on a computer screen, and she fell to her knees and screamed. Her despair was shrill and careening as the telephone slipped from her hand and hit the chilly, indifferent marble tiles with a crack and a snap, breaking apart and eviscerating itself instantaneously.