hung up, dried, folded, and put away. I vacuumed every day, cleaned up his mess of empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. I scrubbed the bathroom and the toilet, did the dishes, cooked a dinner for our son, Kade, and myself, and even made enough for Rick, just in case. When he hadn’t arrived at his mandated meal time, I’d just sighed with relief and bundled up his plate for reheating later.
Or to smash into his bloated fucking face, grinding the endless slabs of meat accompanied by three vegetables he always insisted we had into his skin. Just beat him over and over with it, until the porcelain was pulverised and ground into tiny vicious shards.
Something I worked hard to keep down rose at that idea. She was a sleek black beast, one who wagged her tail, her green eyes gleaming at the thought of it.
Stop that, I told myself. Keep your fucking head down.
But of course, I couldn’t, not to Rick’s satisfaction. I couldn’t help but flinch away from the mask of a face, the red skin mottled by broken capillaries, much like his eyes, now buried in folds of flesh as he screamed at me. A cry built up in my chest, one I frantically struggled to hold down. But his fingers ground against my bone, my muscle, like my skin was nothing within his hands, compressed and wrenched. And then he shook me.
I didn’t even know what I was being punished for at this point, and I didn’t get a chance to consider it. My head whipped back and forth on my spine. My teeth clacked down on my tongue, the taste of blood filling in my mouth. The world that I knew was completely obliterated, replaced instead by this sickening blur. I couldn’t see, couldn’t hold onto anything as the pain ratcheted higher and higher, kicking my previous apathy to the curb and replacing it with pure unadulterated terror.
I wanted to cry out, beg, plead, and I knew it wouldn’t make a difference, but it came anyway.
“Stop!”
My scream rent the air, which was weird, as he was filling it more than satisfactorily with his incoherent listing of all my faults. Maybe because for once, he did fucking stop. There was a moment of complete silence, his face a ridiculous mask of slack-jawed shock.
I wrenched free, my fingers going to where his grip still burned my skin, tears I’d worked so fucking hard to hold back falling like a waterfall now, until Rick was nothing but a goddamn blur. “Stop,” I sobbed. “Stop hurting me. I haven’t said a fucking thing. I made the dinner you wanted. I cleaned every fucking thing. You can’t keep using me as your punching bag to work through whatever’s pissed you off today. Please.”
And that’s when it happened—a brief flare of hope passed through me when I was met by silence rather than aggression. I could almost hear the seconds tick by, blessed, blessed moments of peace.
“Can’t I?”
His words were uncharacteristic in their perfectly vicious calm. Rick always expressed a ‘hot’ rather than ‘cold’ anger, his screams a great messy vomit of all of the frustrations he held bottled up until he got home. That’s perhaps why his strike was almost surgical in its precision.
He belted me across the face, and my head snapped back, my ears instantly filling with a high-pitched ring and a swollen feeling of fullness. An explosion of pain—familiar, yet no less devastating for it—burst into my face, and my eyes went wide as I lurched backwards. I wasn’t allowed to catch my balance; that wasn’t the purpose of this. It was to beat me down. So he got to work, his fist closed this time as he drove it into my nose, the sound of the crack my only warning before agony took over.
I collapsed onto the floor, blood streaming from my face as I screamed in pain. I was dimly aware that he was dealing more damage, with his fists and his feet, but it all felt muted in the face of this. I sobbed into the carpet, bubbles of blood blowing from my nose, and my head felt like a bomb had just gone off in it. All the while, the crying, the build-up of tears and snot just aggravated things further, but I couldn’t stop. Then the other blows began to register, some dull aching things, others more worryingly sharp. His punches rained down, never seeming to slow, and my screams somehow egged