Panic!

She brings her right hand around, palm open, and cracks it across my face with the stinging force of a whip. The sound reverberates through the house, bouncing off walls, coming back like a boomerang to pierce the soft buzzing in my ears. I jerk up convulsively, staring at her, at the cold fiat mask of her face, the hatred in her eyes.

And she stops me again.

I shake my head, and the momentary confusion within gives way to a rebirth of the burning rage which has sustained me all that day. I feel myself shaking, my hands curling into fists, and I open my mouth to tell her not to do it another time, but the words are stillborn in my throat because she slaps me again, and again and again, her hand whipping back and forth across my face like an arcing metronome. The fires consume all reason that the alcohol has not and I know what I’m going to do but I can’t stop it, I bring my right fist up and I watch myself do so as if I have somehow shed the husk of my body, watch the fist come up as if in slow motion and join her face between the aristocratic tilt of her nose and the soft curve of her mouth, watch the lip split, the nose expand, watch blood spurt out to cover my hand, and then she is falling backward, crumpling against the wall by the door, her hands rushing up to cover her red-white face.

I stand frozen with shock, looking numbly at my right fist, and then the silent world in which all of this has happened no longer exists, the sound track comes on at full volume. I can hear Phyllis screaming between her hands, hear her flinging words at me which are not hysterical but merely a brief flare of the hidden emotions which rule her: “You won’t deprive me of what I’m entitled to, you won’t run out on me. I’ll have a warrant sworn out against you for assault, I’ll say that you came in here and beat me and threatened to kill me, the police care about that, Jack, they’ll bring you back and put you in jail and you’ll work in there to pay my alimony!”

She draws her bloodied hands away.

And she is half-smiling redly with her broken mouth.

I reach for the door, blindly, get it open, stagger onto the porch outside. I look wildly around me. Inside, Phyllis is still screaming. Lights begin to go on, one by one, in the neighboring houses, and the black night is consumed by sound. I don’t know what to do, I’m scared, I’m going to be sick, and somebody shouts, moving across a lawn toward me, and then I know what I have to do, I know what I have to do to survive.

Run, Lennox.

Run.