Words

 

Words, Words, Words

Writing is my secret. Writing is my strength. He cannot take that away from me. Each day I walk through life and do everything he tells me to do. Each day I cook and clean and put a smile on my face. He never knows, is never aware that, when he shuts his eyes, I open my laptop and write. He has no control there. The words are my own, and I can be Elizabeth Bennet chiding Mr. Darcy, I can be Judith as she slays the evil Assyrian general Holofernes, or I can be a woman of my own creation. Strong. Capable. Free.

During the day, he thinks I am playing games on the computer. Mahjong, Solitaire, it does not matter what I tell him, he believes me. I tap at the keyboard ever so slow, one key at a time, until each letter forms a word and each word forms a sentence and each sentence comes together to make paragraphs and paragraphs of story after story after story. He would not like my words or my writing, so I keep it secret. I keep it safe. I keep it mine. I listen to the voices in my head in the dead of the night and taptaptap at the keyboard.

He found my words today, and he took my computer. Writing is not good for me, he says, and so I scream at him. I make him pry the computer from me finger by finger. You know what the writing will do to you, he says, but I just scream and scream because he has taken my freedom from me. He has stolen my only piece of happiness. If I am good, if I behave, he may give it back, so I stop screaming and smile. I wipe the tears from my eyes. I cook. I clean. At the dinner table, he brings up children. I smile on the outside because I cannot tell him the truth. He would not like the truth. My words are my children. The voices in my head give them to me and I stroke them and nurture them, until they grow into my stories, and then they fly free and I am at peace. I need my children, need my words, and he does not understand.

So I behave during the day. I cook. I clean. I smile, but, all the time, I hoard pencils and paper and stuff them underneath my mattress. I cannot write during the day, but at night I am free. My handwriting is grotesque because the moon is not shining the way I want it to. He falls asleep, and I sneak the paper out, one sheet at a time. I scribble along, a love story here or a chivalric fantasy there. I want to laugh at something I wrote, but I bite my lip until it bleeds so that I can hold it in. He must not know. He must not steal them away from me.

But tonight, as I slide my fingers past the silky smooth sheets, I find nothing and I know that he knows. He said nothing about it at dinner, only talked of the weather. I find nothing and am heartbroken. Those were my greatest children ever. My best stories. He has stolen my children from me. I cry myself to sleep, hugging my pillow and pretending it is not soft down inside the silky material, but shreds and shreds of paper.

I wake the next morning to the smell of brewing coffee. I walk into the kitchen to the sounds of sizzling bacon and the bubble bubble of percolating coffee. He turns to me as I enter and smiles. It is a killer's smile, the smirk of a man who feels no remorse for the murders he has committed, and I wonder how I could have ever married a killer.

We need to talk, he says, this cannot keep happening, cannot go on. He is right. I smile back at him, wonder what he sees in my lopsided half-grin. We eat breakfast in peace for the first time in ages. I do not scream. I do not cry over the children he has forced me to abandon. Nor do I want to weep or yell. I want to enjoy this morning: the sultry sound of his laugh, the dimples in his cheeks that I had fallen in love with all those years ago. I soak in the beauty of our last meal, for he has given me no choice. I cannot live without my words, my children, but him? Yes, I am sure he can go.

Hours later, they find me, drenched in my husband's blood. Words are scrawled all over the floor, the walls, the counters. Words written with my finger, in his steadily growing colder blood. They drag me away, kicking and screaming for my babies. How could I do such a horrible thing, they ask as they slide the cold, metal handcuffs over my wrists? I do not answer, just smile, because I know my children, my stories, are free at last.