She opens the door that night, some hours after he had already left, to leave him a can of sweet peaches. The same peaches he eats at school. But it’s not the school, rather the old church where she gets them every Sunday. For free.
She doesn’t say anything to him. They both know that he isn’t listening, and yet she doesn’t speak. If she opens her mouth, all that bitter guilt turning and foaming in her gut will spill out from behind her crooked teeth and past her sunken lips, drowning them all.
She wouldn’t want that.
So they stare at each other in the dark silence under that lonely light bulb. The dimmed eye of some distant god, who tells him of the the dark stains spilled down her blouse, wiped hastily from her lap, fermenting in her clothes. And that the terrible bitterness, it chokes her, it gags her from her throat. The bitterness turns her head away. She can’t bear it. And the distant god tells him no more. It cares no more.
She shuts the door between them. Quietly. He hears it lock, the terrible lock. The monster is locked in, and the monster is locked out. It’s a strange sort of mercy she that drinks in that moment, and she takes a long swig. With the drunkenly sweet satisfaction of what she’s done, she plods back up the creaking stairs, her feet dragging. Just a little.
He waits. The basement door clicks shut very cautiously, very softly. There’s a fear. A very sober fear that whispers not wake him. They wouldn’t want him awake. But he must have been asleep for hours, and once he sleeps he’s hard to wake. He must be drunk on something too, but it’s not the mercy.
He waits for the shuffle of her dragging feet to fade into the sour carpet of the only bedroom in the house, and the whine of the tired bed as she lies down. It must hold the weight of the terrible world on its rusty springs, with all that they are drunk on. And then he waits for the night silence. A silence that rings in his ears.
Then he reaches for the peaches and eats them with his bare hands. The watery syrup makes his thin fingers all sticky, dribbling down his chin. As he licks at the rim, the crude edge leaves a headiness of blood in his small mouth and a raggedness on his tongue. He licks at his fingers, tasting the dirt under his nails, the dust on his arm where the syrup had trickled, and the floor where he had spilled some in his haste.
It’s a strange sort of mercy that she’s so deliciously drunk on.
A strange, sick sort of mercy, like canned peach syrup.