War - Anne Wright

He was a veteran and she was his war. It wasn’t always that way, though. It started the week after he returned. He was a goddamn son of a bitch, she said, and she was sorry he didn’t get nailed by that sniper’s bullet, or the punji stakes, or the mine that had blown up his brothers. What could he do but knock her down and kick her?

In the morning, in the bright sun of their tract house in Sacramento, the madness went away and hid somewhere. Joe liked to go to his friend’s house and smoke some dope, talk about the way it was, his version of the way it was, because those black jungle dreams were too real to remember, and it was only the pollony golden buds and the Miller that softened those scenes.

But time would come, Joe knew he had to face Molly before she went completely haywire. So he stopped by the market on his way home for dinner to get her a bunch of flowers. Used to be, she would open the door, dressed in her white silk nightie, red lipstick on and her hair messed up, and she’d put the flowers on the table and lead him to the bedroom and undress him without saying a word.

Now, the summer light was so bright, he couldn’t hardly see into the house when she opened the door. She leaned her face against the doorjamb and he could see that she was crying. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He threw the flowers at her and they fell on the floor, bent and coming apart in a wacky cartoon way, the paper around the stems shrinking back in slow motion, and the drops of water glistening like little jewels on the scratched linoleum floor. She kicked the flowers out onto the front porch, and her leg lifted so high he could see that she didn’t have any panties on under her skirt. He went in and used her, mad about the flowers and her ugly crying face. She was his war.