The Color of Sorrows by A.J. Brown

Author:A.J. Brown [Brown, A.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

ANNIE

Annie stopped eating the Tuesday before she died. She said she wasn’t hungry. I shrugged and walked away. She was an adult, and she could make her own decisions and live her life her own way. Not that either of us had been good at either of those things.

Annie moved in with me the Monday before, choosing to leave a boyfriend who liked to smack her around and cheat on her. I guess the black eye and bruised ribs were the final straw. Or, maybe, it was the death threat. Her life had been a train wreck you wanted to look away from but couldn’t. Not that mine was any better. My wife, Trish—not Patricia—left me a cool two years earlier, taking our daughter with her. She, like my sister, didn’t like getting smacked. Unlike my sister’s boyfriend, I never cheated on her. I liked the bottle, sometimes a little too much. And I was a mean drunk. Hence, her leaving, filing for divorce, and getting just about all our marital assets, including the house, which I still paid for.

For the record, and I guess this makes me look like even more of a jerk for saying this, Trish was no saint. She had her own preferences for alcohol, and she was just as mean as I was—sometimes meaner—when she got liquored. The difference? She was all of five feet tall. Me? I’m six three. When she hit me it rarely did damage. When I hit her, I left marks. Still, she was no saint.

Annie, however, was a saint. She had a big heart, and she was sweet, and leaving Morris was difficult because she ‘loved him.’ She probably did. That’s the kicker in all this, Annie probably really loved Morris, even after everything he had done to her, and it was far more than just a black eye and bruised ribs and death threats.

On the night Annie moved in I don’t think she was looking to leave Morris. I think she wanted someone to talk to and her friends had had enough of her tears and woes and doubts, but she wouldn’t listen to a word they said. So, she knocked on my door at midnight thirty. It was a soft sound, almost not even there. I was awake—lucky break for her—and opened the door on the third of these quiet knocks.

She stood, slump-shouldered, hands down by her sides, tears streaming from one eye, the other one purple and swollen shut. Dry blood had crusted below her left nostril. Her lips were an ugly shade of frown and the hair on the right side of her head wasn’t brushed neatly the way she normally kept it. I found out later Morris had grabbed her by the hair and leveled the punch to her eye that blackened it. She didn’t know how she got free, just that she had, and she ran. Ran. She didn’t get in her car. My sister, younger than me by six years, ran for her life, too terrified to grab her keys, her purse, or her cell phone.

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