All Death Is a Stage

He turns from the window and toward his wife. In the glass in his hand, three fingers of a 10 year aged scotch sloshes slightly over three cubes of ice. It's always three. If one melts before his drink is done, he replaces it. The drink itself also is always three fingers at least, if not more. He used to tell her that you couldn't taste anything less than three fingers when she would admonish him over his drinking. She wasn't admonishing him tonight.

"It's dark, he said, "finally."

No reply.

"Ah, yes. I forgot you were giving me the silent treatment or perhaps you don't see any need to comment on the obvious. That would be a refreshing change of pace, wouldn't it," he says.

Silence.

"How long, do you think, this refusal to engage with me will go on," he asks. "How long will I be forced to talk to the darkness like an idiot?"

He waited and he listened but there was no answer.

"It wasn't my fault," he said, "what happened. It wasn't my fault."

The last words echoed dumbly around the darkened room and dumb he felt for saying them. He knew quite well it was his fault.

"Little Alice is asleep," he says as a means of justification. "I can have a drink if I damn well please. Lord knows I put up with enough. At work. At home. And it wasn't my fault!"

He sets the glass down hard on a nearby table he knows from memory is there. Before, when his temper mastered his reason, he might have thrown it, maybe he still will. Such was his anger.

"Don't you think I would give anything to take it back," he pleads. "Don't you think I wish none of this had ever happened. Please. I cannot fix this without you."

The silence was growing palpable.

"Please," he says again. He stumbles into a plush leather chair she used to tease him about. "You look like an old man," she'd say. "I am an old man," he'd reply. Sometimes she would join him and they would sit, limbs entangled, until the sun came up. In those early days, all they needed was proximity.

Later, Alice would join him, or them, and in the glow of the fire, they would read to her or tell her stories from their youth. She loved hearing about them when they were her age. He hears something fall into his glass. A drop of something. He didn't even remember picking it up. His hand flew to his face and came away wet. Pathetic, he thought. But, he didn't mean it. He cried into the dark, waiting for her to come to him, knowing she wouldn't. Couldn't.

He startled awake when his glass hit the floor. He picked it up. There was a pink glow creeping from under the balcony door and he went to it and opened it wide-letting the morning sun blind him temporarily. He deserved it, he knew. This time he did throw the glass. It shattered against their car that had been dropped off weeks ago by the tow truck. The car would never move again. He stared at it hoping to see what, he did not know. To see it in one piece, maybe. To see his wife and daughter climbing in to go to a playdate. To see himself, lifeless and bloody from the wreck he escaped without a scratch.

"It was my fault," he said. "You didn't blame me, but it was my fault. Tell Alice I love her. That I always will. Tell her that she deserved better than me. Tell yourself that, too. It's true. I am sorry."

He leaves the balcony behind and shuts the door. It is the days he cannot face, devoid of the sounds of life. When night comes, he will go through this all again. Until, he can't take it anymore.