Betty Booze

This is how she found him. He laid his head to rest on that ugly futon that he failed to sell at three annual garage sales. He spent more nights on that futon than in bed with his wife, and not for the right reasons. Each morning he got off work he would bust through the door and let in a soft breeze that welcomed his smell of alcohol sweat. The aroma would dance throughout the living room and kitchen, his version of morning coffee and sizzling bacon.

His chaotic energy invokes a rhythmic wave of eerie silence mixed with reckless rummaging. He is searching for something to taste other than his hot vomit breath. The shuffling of his wife’s slippers echoes around the corner, not even ten seconds later she is hovering above him with her signature long face and squinted eyebrows.

“Daniel,” Elizabeth starts, “It’s too early.”

She is calm every time. She prefers communicating her emotions through facial expressions instead of words. For the ten years they have been married Daniel recognizes three of Liz’s signature expressions: disappointment, irritation, and pleasure. In this case, disappointment seems justifiable, so he decides to crawl out from the path of the refrigerator door, like the leech he is. He retreats to the futon, his favorite place of custody.

The curtains already protecting the tired eyes Daniel encases in his skull, he worries Liz may torture his spirit before visiting his subconscious. He lays fetus style across the futon with his hand at the ready to grab the bottle of Jack conveniently sitting under the futon. His morning drinking drivers her insane and her nicotine addiction drives him to drink; for now, they have adapted to the lifestyle of purposeful misery. They are each other’s motivation to get out of the house and seek shelter or distraction elsewhere. Liz accompanies Dan on the futon, her spot is on the far left with all the burn holes from cigarette droppings. She finds her short loose squares from every time Daniel yells at her for smoking on his futon; she picks half a square and lights it facing away from Dan.

“Elizabeth,” he mocks “It’s too early.”

Here Dan (man) and Liz (woman) occupy the same space while triggering each other's distasteful character traits. Dan knows there is no winning against Liz in a hypocritical argument, so he picks up his half bottle of Jack and pours it smooth down his throat, his Adams Apple bulging with each swallow like a seagull devouring bread.

Liz chuckles but represses a full laugh as she wants to appear still annoyed by Daniel, she draws the image in her mind the first time Daniel was introduced to alcohol. It was the night of their college graduation, which so happened to also be his birthday. Before this he had been preserving his drug and alcohol V-card until after college; he wanted to party so hard that there was a chance of catching an addiction.

Dan chose to drink because he fell in love with Betty Booze. She warms Dan starting in the throat, then stomach and chest, and then finally full body. Although Betty made him dizzy as hell, emotionally incapacitated, and became the first step to ruining his marriage, he always drank to feel her internal warmth. He compared it to the hugs of his mother, she was a small pudgy lady who had a body heat of around 80 degrees thermostat temperature. Liz used to bring Dan a similar warmth, but she picked up her own nasty habit that Dan found unattractive and had to deal with: cigarettes. At first it made his body cringe with nausea and sometimes made him vomit in his sleep when the pillow absorbed the smoke, nowadays he has become immune to the smell but still hates the first initial hit. That’s when he started sleeping on that damn futon.

Liz lights another cigarette and takes a long drag as she keeps a hard stare on Daniel, she inhales sharply and fixes her lips to blow the smoke in the opposite direction of him. His nose flares, he inhales and proceeds with two coughs to indict his discomfort. He belches loudly as he readies his foot to stand, he uses the relief of gas to push off onto his feet. Liz watches him retreat to the kitchen to search in the hopeless empty fridge, he stumbles back in with two beers and half a cheese stick in his mouth with half the wrapper at the end. He hands one beer to Liz and places one on the floor next to his spot on the futon. He plops down as he takes a bite out of half the cheese stick and hands the rest to Liz.

“Breakfast,” he says.

Liz stares down at the cheese stick offering in front of her, she hesitates only because if he accepts that would mean her annoyed front would cancel out. “Food over emotion” she says to herself facially instructing Daniel to feed her her half. As she opens her mouth to devour this half eaten dairy product that is from the hands of her alcoholic of a husband, she cannot help but wonder if this would be the highlight of the week regarding the intimacy of their relationship. She chews the food along with her thoughts, she grinds the words between her teeth before she makes the utter decision to ask,

“Me or Betty Booze, Daniel?”

Daniel stops chewing his cheese as his mind goes blank with any facial expressions. He swallows hard and starts to choke and coughs a couple times to signal his discomfort. “Fuck...” he thinks to himself. Dan turns towards Liz and instantly looks away after seeing the tears building up in her eyes with the red pigment growing on her face and neck.

‘I think it’s time,” Liz confesses.

She gets up from the futon to finally take her leave, she grabs only what she needs: her beer, cigarettes, and a lighter. Daniel makes no move to stop her, stuck in his dilemma between human love and love in addiction.