Panic!

Darkness hooded the land in a black cloak, and the wind grew chill as the sharp and enigmatic reversal of desert temperature manifested itself. A pale gold moon appeared suddenly in the star-pricked velvet of the sky, as if it had been launched from some immense catapult, casting ghostly white shine across the silent landscape.

Night was full-born.

Another day had perished into infinity.

The Second Day...

One

I stand on the porch, supporting myself with my left hand on the stucco wall, and with my right I keep slapping the wood paneling of the door. Open up in there, damn you, I know you’re in there, Phyllis. Open this goddamn door!

And the door opens and she looks out at me with that patronizing, superior expression curling her soft mouth—how could I ever have loved her, how could I ever have thought she was beautiful? Her silver-streaked blond hair is freshly coiffed, even though it is past ten o’clock at night; and the floor-length blue peignoir she wears has fur at the throat and on the sleeves. I know it is expensive, I have never seen it before, she bought it with my money—and she keeps looking at me that way, her eyes reducing me to a pile of soft odorous shit and I feel the rage burning down low in my groin, the flames of it already fanned by the liquor I’ve drunk since the court hearing.

I want to hit her. I want to slap that look away. I’ve never hit her before—any woman before—but God! I want to hit her now...

“Oh, it’s you,” she says with clear distaste. “I might have known it. What do you want, Jack?”

“Want to talk to you.”

“There’s nothing more to be said.”

“Goddamn right there is, goddamn right!”

“You’re drunk,” she says, and starts to close the door.

I lean away from the wall and wedge my shoulder against the wood. She frowns, nothing more. A sculpture fashioned of glacial ice. I push the door wide, moving her backward, and stagger inside, near falling, catching myself on the table in the hall, turning. She has gone out of focus. I shake my head and rub splayed fingers over my face, the nails digging harshly into the skin, and she shimmers, three of her into two into one.

“You’re drunk,” she says again.

“Who has a better right to be drunk, you tell me that.”

“Jack, I don’t want you in my house. Now say what you came to say and get out.”

“Your house! You bitch, your house!”

“That’s right. You heard what the judge said, didn’t you?”

So sweet, so contemptuous, and I think of all the nights with her lying beneath me, warm, whispering, and inside nothing, despising me, playing out a not particularly demanding role while I burst in every way with love for her.

“It’s my house!” I shout at her. “I built this goddamn house with my money!”