Playing With Fire - Carol Arnold

She would let him stay on the couch. What else could she do? She had fallen for the pups, knew if he left, as he said, he would “take the dogs with him.” She watched his slow breathing, lying there asleep on the cabin’s plaid colonial sofa, the pups rising on his chest with each inhale, lowering with each exhale, a pile of sweet contentment. What else could she do?

A thin ray of sun tumbled through the cabin’s only window, making a stripe on the knotty pine wall next to the kitchenette before stretching across the floor. Martha loved this time of morning, the only time light from outside directly penetrated the cabin’s brooding interior. The wind had died and all was quiet except for the raucous shrieks of jays. The thunder and lightening of the night before had produced little rain, and searing heat was expected again by afternoon.

She had tried to get him to put his clothes on but he had refused, instead getting in her bed and snuggling under the down quilt she had brought from home. His blonde hair streaked across the pillow like wheat tossed in the wind. He looked nothing like an ax murderer. When he closed his mouth he resembled Jesus, at least the Jesus of her Catholic Sunday school, the thin, fair, blue-eyed man with the benign expression she had gone to sleep dreaming of every night as a child, the one whose presence blocked the tumult outside her bedroom door, the voices of her parents at first merely raised, then so loud and angry as the night progressed they were a kind of thunder in themselves.

Martha had at first continued to sit on the bed, but as the booming of the electrical storm got closer and closer her greater fear of physical annihilation overcame her slightly milder fear of the strangeness of this man who controlled the lives of the pups, and she climbed in bed next to him.

They lay there awhile, then began to talk. “Why did you memorize that passage from Crime and Punishment?” she asked, cringing at the recollection - I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open….I shall tread in the sticky warm blood. “Why that quote?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “Appealed to me, I guess.” He was on his side now, studying her face, which was turned toward the ceiling. She wondered whether the mascara she had applied that morning had worn off, whether her small eyes looked round and deep the way she always wanted them to, or like beady marbles, the way she hated.

“Why did you take off your clothes?”

“It was hot,” he said.

It was then that it happened, a soft shuffling of his body toward her, the pups being moved out of the way down toward the bottom of the bed. Martha closed her eyes and just as she had done as a child, pretended it was Jesus lying next to her, only this time he was reaching under her sweatshirt and stroking her breasts. Jesus hadn’t needed dental work, did not have a tattoo of angel wings on his back, had clean hair, had certainly not known anything about Russian literature, but for this moment, with mighty blasts of thunder and lightening raining down upon them, the cabin shaking furiously, the dishes rattling in the cupboards, she allowed herself to believe that none of that mattered, that here was a boy/man who needed her desperately, and when had anyone ever felt that way about her before?