Every morning it’s the same routine, shave – shower – argue – breakfast. As he leans in to inspect the coffee I notice his chin’s bleeding but I don’t say anything. Breakfast is a time of truce and without these truces we’d have split up long ago, he knows that as well as I do. I hate having the TV on but as usual Dave gets his way and I wonder if it damages our brains, ingesting all this gloomy news along with our coffee. I look at the vein pulsing in his neck. What if he really did slice it open? I imagine the gasp of shock, the bright-red liquid spurting out, the hand clamped to the neck, the blood splashing in a Jackson-Pollock all up the shower curtain… then I remember it’s not that easy to sever an artery. You have to slice really hard. You have to mean it.
I think about that later as I chop the tomatoes. They’re cheap ones, the skins so thick that you have to poke the knife right in. Like Dave’s skin… some days he annoys me so much I could – I stab again and the juice spurts all up my shirt. On the way to the sink, I catch my expression in the mirror. Sometimes I scare myself.
I put the radio on and hit the news; top story is the woman who murdered her husband. She suffered years of coercive control and in light of that was given manslaughter. Twelve years; out in ten… as I grab hold of the lettuce I wonder about that coercive control. What did he make her do? I cleave the iceberg in two with a satisfying crunch; inside it’s wrinkled like a cold green brain. I wonder what Dave’s brain would look like; I wonder if there’s a part that governs sadistic humour and whether it’d be engorged. I shred the leaves with a boning knife and sluice them under the cold tap. As I spin the salad drier I’m humming I Got You Babe and I realise I don’t know where my mind has got to, nor my life either.
Sarada Gray 