#Chapter 96: Brutus

Karin

“Tick tick tick…”

The jet of a sprinkler shoots water across the green lawn, painting a rainbow in the shimmer of water droplets against the morning sun.

Henry wakes up to the sound of his wife crying against the closed bathroom door.

“Mags?”

Silence. Apathy. Untouched plates of food.

Henry sits on the porch, wearing a faded Hawaiian shirt with a surfboard print. Maggie’s in a chair across from him, almost unrecognizable with greasy, unwashed hair and wrinkled clothes.

He’s made her iced tea.

“With a dash of mint,” he says, his tone gentle.

Maggie stares ahead. There’s a dead look to her eyes.

Leaves crunching. Greased palm. Black car.

Maggie’s hollow eyes torment him. He misses when her eyes were alive, when they sparkled with joy, and even when they sizzled in anger at whatever dumb things he did.

It’s her eyes that flicker in his mind when he’s approached.

‘I can be a rat,’ he thinks.

He says “yes,” without asking the obvious: “Why me?”

Later, he will ask himself