Bottle

More or less, in the spirit of Halloween.

In the living room, I struck him with the empty bottle of champagne I had in my hand. There was a flurry of green glass and a mist of blood, as if, for a moment, it was sleeting Christmas colors. They don't tell you the truth about what it is like to kill a man. When they warn you about the consequences, about the guilt and the grief, no one cares to mention how it gets there. It's the strangest thing; how along with all of that blood, a reel of film spools out from the back of the poor bastard's skull, and the sun swings on its axis to project their lives on the back wall for you to watch. The strangest thing. I watched as he skipped stones with his brother, raced him up and down a lake shore. He made love to a pretty girl with bangs in the backseat of his mother's station wagon and after he dropped her off that night cried, inexplicably, with his head on the steering wheel. He tore his knee freshman year of college playing soccer, replaced sports with literature, published a few descent stories over the course of his years. At thirty, he married and this was the first time I met his kids. They looked strong and tan, with their toothy smiles projected against the wall of my study as their father crumpled in slow motion at my feet. I nearly forgot myself, then. Something centrifugal began to turn inside of me. The neck of the champagne bottle, which I had been clutching white-knuckled through all of this, fell from my fingers. Vomit or tears contested for the right to shake through my body. I prepared to pitch myself to the carpet, to clutch at the corpse of this man who was now my friend, and beg to some God for his resurrection. But the film on the wall kept running. And there, pinned up like a calendar girl, amidst all of this man's best days, was the body of my wife. My wife, smiling at him with her head on his chest. My wife making love to him in our backyard, the chrysanthemums I planted for her clear in the background, and shrieking, but not stopping, when the sprinklers came on. My wife mouthing “I love you” over and over as he took her picture with a Polaroid camera. The hot gust of her breath in his ear when she said, “Of course I'll leave him. Of course.” The reel ran black. I looked at the cracked body at my feet and I remembered. I remembered.