Man Eater

“Forever is a long time to wait.”1

After the phone call, he hung up and laid his head against the wall.2

“Rejected again,” he murmured, sighing in frustration. When he had made the promise, he’d been more than a little drunk and knew it to be a mistake. At the time, it had been made willingly.3

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“You mean that?” she’d asked, starry eyed from drinking, but still doe eyed enough to appear innocent; fragile.5

“I swear, even if it takes forever.” He’d said, his knees begging silently for him to stand. She laughed into the smoke-clogged air and inhaled the toxic fumes with every new giggle. Her hair fell in waves down her back, while echoes of laughter vibrated along a revealingly delicate throat.6

“He’s drunk; you can’t hold him to that,” a friend said, glaring with green eyed envy at the princess on her throne.7

Her face transformed. The light in her eyes ran to hide from the storm that made quick procession across her fine-boned features. 8

“Of course I can,” she answered, the iciness in her voice freezing the very air. The frozen currents chased goose bumps down his arms.9

“I’ll never know how she can be so fiery and stay so cold,” he whispered. She spun to retort, but the drink stirred her vision like a Martini, and all but the shadow of his words were forgotten.10

“Forever is a long time for anything,”11

Her face was lovely as a poem, and when she smiled, it held the passion of a thousand yearning hearts. How could anyone look as entrancing as they wrung the last drop of blood from a heart? She poured the drippings into her morning coffee and drank them down like cream. “Good to the last drop,”12

“If you love me, you’ll wait for me,” she warned, with her impregnable sense of knowledge. With her heavy glare she dared him to say otherwise. 13

“Everyday,” he whispered, hoping that he could bore a hole in the ground with his eyes. Perhaps China was somewhere he could hide from her? She laughed and tightened her grip on his leash. 14

“Then wait.” She taunted, and scratched behind his ear as he whimpered for her affection. For a moment she considered what it was that she would say next.15

“If you love me, you’d let me go. If I love you, I’ll return.” She sneered, watching as his smile leapt off of his face, committing suicide. The pain filled silence was broken by the turn-over of the engine of her boyfriend’s car. 16

“If,” he said, staring down at his broken smile. She bent to pick up her suitcase, and her halo toppled to the ground. “Never could keep it in place,” She kicked it away and piled her belongings in his car. 17

“Forever is a long time to wait,” she whispered as they drove over his happiness and tracked it miles behind them.18

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The marriage flopped like a fish on a bank. Small town life never loved her like the big city. 20

“The kids are playing in the yard. They’ll never recognize the jail break ‘til it’s too late.” She told her lover, biting at the wedding band a different man had given her. Her eyes tracked briefly to the two children in the yard, burying toys like broken dreams in sand. The boy’s overalls held forlorn hopes, the girl’s bouncing pigtails the knowledge of loss. 21

They broke down the door and stole her husband’s car to make the break. She escaped with a mini-dress and a sure thing that never did quite fit in her pocket.22

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“I mean it,” he yelled, throwing her out of the front door. She had sailed for a minute, but the crash came too soon…just like the two sons she’d borne him. “You’re a lying whore,” he told her, watching her dust herself off and run with her cubs to a safer den. The children were like video cameras-everything they saw through their lenses was recorded, replayed again and again later. They ended up like broken records, stuck on the same track of pain. “Years later, suicide found them, and they both took a long leap with a rope that never was nearly long enough.”24

“When did it all fall apart?” she asked herself as they piled into the car, sardines to the tin can. The skeletons danced their way around them. “That’s not living!” Even the dead knew a bad life when they saw it.25

The motel was decayed, and she could bet the roaches had a nicer room than she did. 26

“I’ve got someone who’ll take care of you,” she told the kids, marveling at how easily they were comforted. The roof caved in but they had their blankets. She massaged the worst of the nightmares out of their frontal lobes. The night was long and the insects longer, as she dreamed of cotton candy clouds that were bitterly sour.27

Her hometown stood like a sentinel against the woods. In the boxing ring against the forest-fighting to be the last one standing. “They want to be kings, they want to be champions,” 28

“Where’s our new home?” they whimpered, small bellies empty and rumbling with fear. Her not-so-matronly hands pulled them down the worn path; her eyes sightless as she avoided stares that held the weight of memories behind them. She was like a wolf stalking her prey. They whined and scuffled tiny feet obediently behind her. “My equilibrium may be off, but my intuition is never wrong,”29

“You haven’t come to stay,” he said, eyeing the two children that stared like wide-eyed animals caught in the high beams of oncoming traffic. She accustomed herself to how little he had changed. She shook her head, but he let her in. She tucked the kids in their bed and ran through the night without much thought or astral guidance.30

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“The good life is for a price, and your credit just ran out,” She drank and gambled her way through distant thoughts. Correlations of when she was happy were just too easy for the beer to steal, until in the good will department, she was a pauper. Guilt became her friend, and drank with her often. Since Misery loved company and had nothing better to do, he kicked her angel off of her should and set up camp. He spoke of pain while guilt spoke of four children that shared her blood but couldn’t recall her name. 32

“’Til the wheels fall off, I won’t return!” she saluted the bad luck totem. Years passed, but even when the wheels fell off she just kept walking. 33

The fortune teller scratched her palm in the canvas tent. 34

“Sometimes to see the future, one must look to the past. Dirty mirrors help. You’ll never clean it ‘til it’s hard to see.” She said. Mysticism lit her eyes, but money lit her wrinkled smile. 35

She stood and left the roadside carnival, the trucker with her oozing drink and stale cigarettes. “You ever been with a real man, baby?” he heehawed like a jackass as he drove along. She shook her head, and complacence only gained her fifty miles more to his gallon. 36

“Now get out!” he yelled as she was thrown out in her torn clothes. The asphalt was hard, but her hide was tougher.37

The evening crashed down like a broken mirror. That night she slept in a field and imagined that the fireflies were candle lights in a ceiling. She pretended she wasn’t alone. “Is that a snake or are you just happy to see me?” 38

She wandered a long time down endless alleys, taking high after high so she would never fall. “Life hands you lemons, you make lemonade…unless it squirts you in the eyes.” 39

She stole to live, but lived for nothing. Her body became a desecrated temple where the weak and useless preyed. 40

“Before I wondered when it began…now I wonder when it will end.” She whispered and inhaled the smoke. “Maybe the more poison I put in me, the less I’ll feel.” Brain cogs jammed, forgotten. A mind can only go so far with shorted circuitry. 41

So much time was spent in forgetting that it simply became easier not to remember. Dry veins crumbled under the pain of her bee sting, and hard worked lungs collapsed under the weight of their own diseased workings. “I saw God…he spat in my face and told me to go to hell.”42


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The nurses floated like small fairies and they flitted from one sickbed to the next on small wings. “It’s hard to believe she’s not looking into the past with eyes that distant.” 43

They worked their magic under the bright sparkle of fluorescent lights. White masks and newspaper gowns made up her entire existence for minutes, or days, or years. After a while, time was as useless as thought, but it was all she had until pain came back. The minutes ticked by like hours, but she wouldn’t give the nightmares the satisfaction of crying. Shakes and chills set in, and then the darkness came with screaming bugs. There was no high to float her down, so she crashed into oblivion and stayed for a time. 44

“You’re not sick, but you can’t be well with that face.” The doctors told her, staring into her lifeless eyes. “Broken hearts are hardest to diagnose-they’re impossible to see.” Her release wasn’t free, but it was cheaper than an arm and a leg. “Pass the breast. I want white meat only.”45

The merry-go-round wasn’t so merry, but it did bring her round to where she started from. The sidewalks still held the footprints from her last trip down memory lane. She followed them like a hand into a glove. “Hard to believe it still fits,” He answered the door, his face deep and sad. 46

“I’m here to stay,” she said, smiling and hoping that her ulterior motives would stay hidden behind her teeth. She waited to see if his smile would be resurrected. 47

“You never were,” he muttered bitterly, but let her in.48

“Their fall was swifter and more complete than yours,” he explained when asked of the two children she had left behind. The years suddenly caught up to her and held tight. She became the bull at a rodeo and this rider was refusing to be thrown. 49

“I’ll still stay,” she said graciously, and with the skill of June Cleaver swept his broken heart under the rug. 50

“Your sights are set so far in the future, I’d bet you see heaven.” He said as they walked along. Her distant look answered him with final authority. He shook his head sadly, aching bones made brittle with the pain of realization. Lucidity was rare for him, but now and then he relapsed. 51

“What I do see is a grave.” She intoned deeply. Wisdom escaped him in old age, so he stared with senile comprehension.52

His presence was heavy and painful the final days. His heart beat like a small bird trapped in a cage. His breath was like wind through moth eaten cloth. 53

“It was always too late,” she told him as she kissed his brow plainly. “But I needed your love to survive,” she whispered, and his liver spotted hands groped for hers. 54

“I love you,” he whispered, his soul seeping out into each breath, pieces of the puzzle escaping from the whole. “So have it for eternity.”55

In the end, he closed his eyes, and his body became an empty shell, his spirit drifting aimlessly up to the heavens under her callous predator’s eye. 56

“I suppose it’ll do,” she replied, and sucked down his broken heart.
“This one will have to last me forever.” She sighed, moving away from her only true love, withered and wrinkled like old laundry. “I did promise, didn’t I?” she whispered, delicately caressing a stick of cancer between two stained fingers. 57

“Then again, Forever is a long time to wait,” She whispered, and without a backwards glance, the Man-Eater returned to the prowl.