69
Corinna Schulenburg
Ms. Scarlet in the Study
T
So stunned they stand in a semicircle around it, the body, as it decants into the floral rug and gives the study a surgical feel, that glint of knife and glove. There is no one whose throat fills with blood that has not, at some point, been loved. We’re careless with it, she thinks, just as we’re careless with this, our hate, as if each person, even the worst of us, wasn’t the handiwork of a thousand tendernesses, now all undone. Well, he was a jerk, this fresh cadaver, he gave us all a quiver of reasons and it was only a matter of logistics, the when, the how, not the why. But who? She looks around: there’s his father, a turnip-faced man with hands like canned hams, who hated him for being smarter. There’s his mother, a bouquet of raw nerves, who despised him since that week of nights when he would not, could not, sleep. He’s sleeping now, if death is rest, and not a long fall into a starless box. There’s his wife, weeping like a sprung dam, keening like a bowed saw. Convincing, if you’re the kind to find grief reliable. She’s not. She’s wept over commercials and turned stone for the death of beloveds. Anyway, the wife, more than anyone, had had enough. He was loathsome in the ways that are common: coward, bully, hypocrite. But he also cultivated rare orchids of cruelty, of spite. So this was the night all that ended. The daughter also sniffles, though that could just be allergies. The friend is mumbling something, maybe an elegy, or apology.
S
