Alone: A Love Story. Michelle Parise

This isn’t happening.

      But it is. Scattered all over the snow is everything inside of me, torn up and then spit out by this hyena of a man. Right there, at the most awful moment of my life, I suddenly recall a dead moose I saw in a national park once as a teenager — it was nothing but bones in the snow, and fanned all around the bones was its hair.

      “Why is it like that?” I asked, and the Park Guide said the wild dogs tore into the moose fast for meat, spitting the hair out while they were tearing it to shreds. This is the image I think of in those first few moments of shock. I am just bones in the snow, everything has been torn out.

      The next day I call our real estate agent. Staring right across the dining table at The Husband, I say into the phone, “We need to sell the house. We need to sell it this week.”

      CHAPTER FIVE

       FALLOUT

       THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

      It’s been three days since The Bomb dropped. I’m driving home from work. I’ve slept maybe two or three hours the past few nights, and then only with the help of sleeping pills and whiskey. The pain in the place where my heart once was is something awful. I drive straight to the liquor store and buy a bottle of Southern Comfort.

      I’m thirty-seven years old and this is the first time I’ve ever bought a bottle of booze for the express purpose of drinking it alone. I’m pretty sure everyone in the store can tell there’s something wrong with me. I carry the bottle out by the neck, no bag, nothing.

      Even though it’s February, there’s some kind of freak weather system happening that’s mirroring the freak weather system in my marriage. It’s really warm out, and everyone is walking around in T-shirts looking slightly confused and unsure. The windows in my car are rolled down as I pull out of the parking lot, making a right turn onto a major street without looking first.

      I cut a car off, and the guy is not impressed. He immediately starts honking, and since his windows are also down I can hear him screaming at me. For the next few minutes he follows close behind me, honking the horn and yelling. I am shaking so hard. I can’t handle his anger because I am nothing but thin threads of a person over here. The bottle of Southern Comfort rolls on the passenger seat. The liquid sloshes along with the angry horn-honking. I can’t wait to get home so I can drink it. I think of how only one month ago The Husband and I were on vacation, on a beach dancing close, talking about how we were going to do better, how this year was going to be ours. We kept calling it our “second honeymoon.”

      At the next light, the guy I cut off pulls up beside me, tires screeching. He’s about sixty years old, with long dreadlocks that hang past his shoulders, his car covered in a thin film of winter. He leans out of his window and practically into mine, shouting, “You want to kill yourself or something? You want to kill me? You don’t have a family? You don’t care about my fam—” He stops abruptly. I see his face fall. He can tell something’s wrong with me.