Ashes, Ashes by Fredrick Soukup

Author:Fredrick Soukup [Soukup, Fredrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
Published: 2024-04-16T11:24:25+00:00

Monica

I love Heath so much I hope he’s dead.

I’m listening to Radiohead on my phone. In Rainbows is me and Heath’s favorite. The basement guest room is cool and bare. It’s boring as church down here. This is where I’ve been since the procedure. This is where I belong. The walls are robin’s egg blue. The carpet is the color of bourbon. The closet has two cream white doors that fold in half when you pull the knobs in the middle of them. Through the egress window I can see the sun. It’s being such a weirdo. It’s purple, almost black, and the sky is pink, so it looks like a little tiny lifeboat in this big ocean. A big ocean dyed pink one drop of blood at a time.

At first Mom told Dad and Jeremy that I’d had an ovarian cyst removed. This was smart because they don’t know what cysts are. Or ovaries. After the procedure, I moved from my bedroom on the second floor down here to the guest room because it was easier for me to go downstairs than up. Mom brought me everything. Food, painkillers, clothes, fresh towels. She was a nurse and a maid. So I’d have something to do, she put the basement TV on the chest at the end of the bed. Some church lady upholstered the chest with happy daisies before she went blind. I didn’t watch TV. I texted while listening to music on my phone. When it died, I was too lazy to charge it. Instead, I stared at the daisies until they danced. Mom charged my phone upstairs so she could look over the texts. I deleted anything that might tell on me for what I’ve done, my shitty doings, and I always warned Heath not to message me when the battery was low.

I still haven’t brought the rest of my things down. Basically, I’m a guest in my own house and I’ll keep it this way until I leave for good. Mom hasn’t offered to bring them down, either. Maybe she thinks she’s punishing me by keeping me in my recovery room forever. Maybe she doesn’t know I like the punishment.

Oh, Heath. The pain he goes through every day is more than I can stand to watch. I’ve always known it would end like this. Still, he talks and talks. A million tiny lies are nothing to him, how smart he is. I always listened. I told him things and he listened too. It was like meeting the devil in the confession booth.

How I’ll tell it to the authorities will be different than how it was. I’ll be honest, only there’s just too much to tell. Like how Sandra was being such a brat about me and Heath having sex that I decided to take the pregnancy test at her house and leave the pee stick in the bathroom trash bin for her mom to find. It was Julie Ann’s idea. It was funny, then it wasn’t. I took the stick home to show Mom.

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