Charlie and Angie

From the outside of the house she could hear the police calling, though she couldn’t really make out what they were saying. There were noises outside the bedroom window too; she guessed it was the police. Angie Clark sat in the darkness of her bedroom staring out at the light in the hallway. Sitting up against the bedroom door was Charlie, her husband. His hands were bound in duct tape and his face covered in dried blood. At least he was off the couch.

Charlie Clark hadn’t always been worthless. In college, where he and Angie met, he was a charming handsome man with a bright future ahead of him. He and Angie wed after graduation and he took a job at the local bank. Angie stayed home and tried to get pregnant. After several years it was obvious that a family wasn’t in their future and that’s when things began to derail.

Charlie seemed to lose interest in his wife. The compliments and simple please and thank you between them diminished. He did more things “with the boys” and less with her. The several weeks without intimacy became a month and then another month. Angie suspected, but never confronted him. The one Friday afternoon Charlie came home with a cardboard box in his hand, jobless.

It had been down hill from there. Angie left the home and started working, evenings at Wal-Mart and then overnights as a cleaning woman at the local high school. Charlie collected unemployment and over the next three months, around thirty pounds. He stopped carrying for himself completely, no longer bathing or shaving; Angie began to feel like she was living with a homeless person.

Though they shared a home they had become roommates not a married couple. Angie was glad he stopped trying to have sex with her, not that the sex was ever great but at least she felt loved. Now he barely acknowledged her. She would come home in the mornings and there he would be, laying on the couch in his filthy boxer shorts and tee shirt, fat and unshaven the picture of disgust. She struggled to remember why she loved him, why she married him, but all she could see was his bloated body laid out on her the couch she had bought with the money from their wedding three years ago.

On the third morning of Charlie’s most recent stretch on the couch, Angie arrived home exhausted, frustrated and sad that at the age of twenty-five she felt her life was over. She wanted to wake Charlie up, pounding her fists into the soft meat of his chest and screaming at him to pull himself together and to find work. She wanted to tell him to be a man or she would leave him. But she just stared at him and let herself begin to cry. She made her way to the bathroom and was greeted with a horrible stink.

It reminded her of a summer vacation her family took when she was eight. It was a toll road restroom in Indiana somewhere. Her mother took her into the bathroom and it was a scarring experience. The smell of feces and urine were overwhelming and the sight of the bathroom and what had been done with it made her shudder to this day.

The toilet was clogged. Not with paper, but excrement. It was so vile, so hideous she stepped out into the hallway and took a deep breath. The purpose of the breath was to let loose upon the sleeping Charlie the sum of her anger and frustration, but instead it came out of her a whimper. She was giving up on her and them, her whole life. She forced herself into the bathroom and looked for a way to fix the toilet. That’s when she saw it.

For a wedding gift her grandmother had bought her white and robin egg blue towels. They were simple cotton towels but they were special to her. The day after the wedding Angie’s grandmother died and they towels, as silly as it seemed reminded Angie of her precious grandmother. Angie now found this towel tossed into the bath tub covered in human waste. It was obvious what Charlie had done with it. She knew there was toilet paper in the house. The rage was building, she checked the bathroom closet, three feet from the toilet and there it was an unopened pack of toilet tissue.

She fell into a rage like she had never felt in her life. The culmination of all that had gone wrong in her life spilled out of her violently. From the bathroom she marched to the kitchen and grabbed a dirty frying pan from the sink. Upon returning to the living room she stood over Charlie, the pan raised above her head. There was a second, just a fleeting second where she knew that if she brought the pan down her life would never be the same and that the safe route was to leave and never look back. She brought the pan down instead, crushing Charlie’s face.

The beating was a blur of blood and screaming. Angie couldn’t remember how or why she taped his hands together or how the police got involved. She only knew that now after an entire day of drama night was falling and it would be over soon. She was still young at twenty-five though the prospects of her life after this consisted of prison and public shame. Charlie’s prospects included lots of doctors’ visits and public sympathy perhaps. Angie was too tired to ponder what others would think, she just wanted it over.

The same towel Charlie had used to clean his bottom, Angie used to strangle him with. It was disgusting and took longer than she thought it would. After words her arms ached something awful. Her own end she considered carefully but quickly. The police were pressing hard now for her to give up or they were coming in. She considered suicide by cop but felt it was unfair to burden an innocent man with her death. In the end it was a bottle of sleeping pills, rubbing alcohol and peroxide from the wretched cesspool of a bathroom. Her last thoughts were of her family, not Charlie but her mother and father. She felt bad for the shame they might feel, but maybe the cops would tell them about the bathroom, maybe then they would understand.