Tag Archives: anger

Doll – Part IV

Leave a reply

“Jesus Christ, CJ!”

Chalmers stirred as the sound of her voice rang down upon him. He wasn’t waking up, because he wasn’t really asleep, but he was being drawn out from wherever he was by her sour tone.

He had yet to open his eyes, but he squeezed the lids shut tighter just the same to eliminate the possibility of any light at all getting to his eyes and ultimately his aching, pudding-head brain.

“Oops,” he said, but it sounded more like, “Ooopshhh,” as he forced his words into the floor.

“Have you been there all night?” Margie said. “Again?”

The linoleum felt cool on his face, nice really. A puddle of drool had formed near his mouth. When the unexpected burp erupted from his lips, his acidic breath splashed the fluid and the smell reminded him of his reason for his current position on the floor … scotch.

If his math was right, and even the slightest thought of math made him queasy, this was the seventh time she found him sprawled out on the kitchen floor, incapacitated, incoherent and incapable of meaningful communication.

“I mean …” Margie stood over him one hand across her stomach, one hand rubbing her forehead. Chalmers dared to open his eyes just ever so slightly. She never came into focus. He never moved his head, so the odd angle at which she appeared while being all fuzzy struck him as oddly funny.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. He vaguely remembers her saying those exact words around time number four, but that time there was crying and a little pleading. This time…

“I can’t!”

“You,” Chalmers said with great effort. He paused to erupt in another hiccough/burp that made his body jerk. “Don’t … under … stand. You … never…”

“Don’t, CJ!” Margie shouted down at him. “Don’t you dare! I miss her too, every day! Don’t you dare tell me I don’t understand. At least I faced it. I didn’t hide from it and escape up into some bottle of gin!”

“Scotch!” Chalmers sort of yelled. The need to correct her forced his head from the floor. He held it there in a weary delirium for a three count before letting it drop again into his drool.

“It’s been five years,” Margie said. “Five years she’s been gone. And you left shortly after that! I can’t do this. I want to live! I’m not going to watch you drink yourself to death. She … would hate what you’ve become.”

The soft cushion of alcohol gave way to a torrential wave of anger. He swung out at her with his arm with little chance of connecting. “Shhhhuuddup!”

He rolled over onto his back swinging out at her. “Shuddup! You don’t know! You don’t know!” Tears breached his eyes and began to trickle down his face. He began to sob. “You don’t know!” he tried one last time, but it came out as nothing she could understand.

“I know,” she said, the calm in her voice reflecting her resignation. “I know all too well. I lost everything that day. I lost her. I lost you. Everything. I can’t do this. Goodbye.”

His blinding tears prevented him from seeing her leave. His sobs prevented him from hearing her go, but when the door closed and she was gone, the weight of her absence fell upon him, crushing him almost completely.

Ghost

Leave a reply

Time was indefinable. She no longer marked the days. The sun cycles and the passing seasons simply went on as they always had, one after the other, with little consequence. She no longer wrapped herself in the warmth of sunbeams or reveled in the wonder of the moon. She was…cold.

She no longer sat, or stood, or ran. She did not hunger. She did not thirst. At least, not in a way she could describe. Still, there was a need, a yearning for something long gone. Her desire to embrace it, to possess it stirred a rage she had not known before, for all the yearning and pain, defining the thing seemed beyond her.

Visitors made infrequent stops to the house where she made her home. They often brought with them at least a glimmer of that which stirred her desires and being with them seemed to quell the longing, but not the need. That deep-rooted need and the inability to satisfy the hole it created seemed very much like an insatiable hunger. A hunger that often stirred the rage.

Like most visits, the welcome is only as good as the guest. She believed it was incumbent upon the guest to know when to go. If they could not give her what she needed, she had no use for them. They crowded her. They neglected her. They ignored her. They taunted her with their lives…their life.

The realization strikes like a crushing hammer blow.

Life.

She could not feel in a way she thought she remembered. She could not touch. She sought herself in reflective glass, but nothing was revealed. She sought herself in the residue of daily life, a pile of dirty clothes, a used coffee mug, a well read newspaper, but things remained as they were where she was unless they, her visitors made them otherwise.

Life.

They laughed. They cried. They yelled, and battled, and forced both violence and love upon each other with insurmountable restrictions and self-serving conditions. And all the while, she could only observe and taste the tiny scraps of life’s energy cast off by the fools who knew so little about the value in what they inherently wasted.

She was…or was she?

She was, but she wasn’t.

She was once, but now she is just an echo. A shadow one seems to glimpse behind a door, or that scurries to the corner when the light flickers on.

She once was, but now she only lurks in the mists of time, trapped in an astral plane that is the world she once knew so well, and like them, took for granted.

Rage

Leave a reply

Dart plopped himself into the driver’s seat of his car. He slammed the door with great authority and enjoyed the extra noise it made in the parking garage. He forced a calm into his hand so that the key slid into the ignition easily. His teeth clenched harder to take up the slack. The car came to life and he backed it out carefully, but his grip on the wheel was tight and unforgiving. He pulled around to and through the automatic gate and stayed relatively silent until he hit the street. At that point, he was free to unleash.

He started with a solid string of expletives, low and slow at first, but long enough to build to the point where the last few raked his vocal cords. His hands clenched the wheel tighter and as he stopped at the first traffic light, he let out a scream that both released an initial wave of frustration and a spray of saliva that dotted his windshield. Dammit! How he hated a dirty windshield.

Moving past the level of primal expression, he strung together actual words that formed hateful, yet basic rhetorical questions the car certainly would not be able to answer.

“What the hell was that?”

“What did they mean by that?”

“Who does that?”

“What kind of…”

Another primal shriek filled the enclosed space.

The radio had avoided drawing his attention that was, until the first words of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” seemed to hit him in the face. He hated Tainted Love.

“SHUT UP!”

Dart punched the dial, dropping the radio into silence. A tiny sense of reason rose from the back of his head. He hoped that he didn’t pop it so hard that he broke it. In general, his radio was his car ride companion and they logged hundreds of thousands of miles together in times far worse than this. He would miss it if he broke it and would be extra pissed to have to fix it.

Rage

Leave a reply

The rage swelled up inside him, pressing heavily against the worn and rusty latch where he kept it. To say it was in his mind was wrong. The rage dwelled in the dark shadows and recesses near his soul, but when triggered, the mind was its playground.

He had mere seconds for rational thought as the feeble latch, grown weaker from years of valiant service, held admirably. Decision time and the question was simple. Do I suppress the rage or release it?

Suppression meant calling upon some form of energy cavalry to rise up and quell the insidious rage, a force that generates instant thoughts of perspective and common sense into the brain to combat the swell. Are you really getting this mad over this?  It’s an unexpected bill. It’s a spilled bowl of taco dip. It’s just not that big a deal.

To release? To release meant working the latch just enough to undercut its integrity and allow the rage to do the dirty work. It meant setting free the full on raw emotion of all things wrong and unfair. Yes, it’s taco dip, but that’s just one thing, the camel’s straw, the tip of the ice burg of all things wrong and dysfunctional in this world from the second that bowl tumbled from the refrigerator and on and back to when his bike was stolen when he was nine and a half years old.

The rage was primal, raw, irrational, immature, greedy and…exquisite.

The rage always came with consequences, something to fix, an apology to make. But those moments, drenched in pure human emotion, writhing and contorted by unadulterated anger and fearless of self or other of exhaustion and tears, could be cleansing. It could be a welcome release, a way to drain the tank of frustration and woe that might give the latch a chance to fight another day.

He looked down at the dip that had splashed across his sock covered foot, the floor and started a short climb up the cabinet wall next to him. His foot surrounded by broken glass.