Taking out the Trash Ray Barr

Taking out the Trash

Ray Barr

The room was suddenly silent. She backed away from him, but she couldn’t look elsewhere. Her gaze fixed on his eyes. His eyes that were still looking at the door. His eyes that held her in silence.

She broke the silence with a laugh.

He didn’t react, of course. His face remained the unchanged stoic model.

She had never won before, but it didn’t feel as glorious as she’d imagined. He ruined her satisfaction. The one time she ever hoped for joy, he managed to spoil that, too. How could she expect anything different from him? There is no way in hell he would gratify her by actually emoting for once.

She breathed a sigh while moving into the bedroom. He stayed.

She tossed her belt down in the middle of the floor and went to his closet. When she opened the door her anger redoubled; her closet could have fit in his three times over.

“Relax,” she breathed, It’s my closet now. She started on the shirts, but it didn’t really matter the order. After the shirts, she moved on to the ties. So many fucking ties. Who needs five green ties? She could almost picture him holding up two of them, trying to decide if it was an emerald or shamrock day.

When she finished clearing his closet, the pile in the center of their room reached right above her knee. He couldn’t hear a room over, but that didn’t stop her from saying “a shit ton of clothes for a shit guy.”

She had to walk past him to get into the kitchen, but this was the first time that she saw him and wasn’t repulsed. Maybe the remorse was catching up to his face.

She got out the ice pack. The one she usually gets; the one with the smiling bears on it. at this point, getting the ice pack was a reflex, and then she would go to the supermarket just to get out of the house. But she got food yesterday. The only thing left was to clean up the mess.

She swept up the plate first and tossed it in the trash.

Then she stuffed his mound of clothes into a black garbage bag, tied it up, and put it by the door. The door he was still looking at.

She only had one thing left to bag up. She got another black garbage bag from under the sink, but it only covered half of his body, so she used two.