V. H. King's Ink

Prompt: Then, very faintly, from the house next door, came the sound of breaking glass.

---

“You ever realize how many things taste like soap?”

“The day you say something sane is the day I know you’ve gone off the rails.  Which crazy train you been riding that’s got you eating soap?”

“I didn’t eat it.” 

Galf grinned, gummy and pink without his upper dentures.  She couldn’t see him, but she didn’t need to.  She could hear it as easily as she could hear the pride when he says,

“I’s a bad kid.”

“A right mess is what you are.”

“Love me for it, don’t you?”

“Always and forever.”

Galf hummed to himself, low and pleased.  Enid smiled from where she was curled up on the couch.  A righteous mess indeed, but he was hers.  After forty years, she wasn’t sure she could wander this wide world with anyone else.  She certainly didn’t want to; she knew that much.

“Shaving cream tastes like soap.  Shampoo of course.  Chapstick—even the strawberry kind, believe it or not.”

Except Galf’s shampoo smelled like vanilla pudding.  She didn’t know what it was that gave it that plastic-sweet-scent, but it was there every time he washed up after cutting the grass and decided that, for whatever reason, he should towel dry his hair and then stick his head in her face so she could smell his scalp.  Your sniffies give me the good luckies, my darling. He certainly needed something. 

“I suppose even toothpaste would taste like soap then, if they didn’t put that mint flavor in it.”

“No no nooo.  Toothpaste is too chalky.  Soap?”  Galf pops his lips on the single-syllable word.  “It’s slick.  Not silky.  More of an oily taste.  After, under, all around.”

He’s licking his gums.  Enid knows it the same way she knows his dentures are done fizzling out in their seltzer water.  Squeaky clean for a brand new day.  Not that they’d see the morning sun for another ten hours yet.

“Tell me Galf—how much soap have you eaten in your lifetime?”

“Age ain’t nothin’ to the brain.”

“I’m sure it wouldn’t be, if you had one.  Sounds to me like yours been washed away.”

“I haven’t had that much—promise.  I don’t go sneakin licks off the ivory bar, anyhow.”

“You don’t?”

“I catch some of the bubbles on my tongue, washing dishes.”  A not-quite sulky shrug; the kind of honesty that had always warmed her heart.  “I can’t help myself, they’re just so pretty.”

“Same as your soul, sweetheart.”

Another rumble of a hum.  Enid sets aside her tea-mug, now that it’s empty.  She should be sleepy, but isn’t.  Not quite.  Not yet.  But their quiet evening, with the yellow light on the field-green walls and the navy-blue couch; the plush grey carpet worn bare for all their feet moving across it; the thin pink afghan, fraying and free of frills but full of tears—the night and the nostalgia soothe her. 

Galf’s nearness, just in the next room over, brings her just as much security as the blanket.  It’s a tiny thing—more like a napkin across her belly.  Swollen once and pierced, but ballooned no more.  Enid keeps the blanket close, holding in her heart and her hands the possibility of life as often as she can. 

“It sticks with you.”  Galf has his fingers laced over his own chubby tummy, his head tilted to the ceiling.  “But it’s a slippery thing.  Isn’t that something?”

Absolutely.  The whole world was something, when gazed at through glitter and grief.  Those diamonds in their eyes when they’d first been married, how they’d multiplied.  Enid picks up the book of word searches on the side table.  Her pen slides out—a purple one that’s got a bad habit of seeping into the soft pulp of the pages.  She plucks it from the cushions before the couch can eat it, as it has devoured so many others.

A single bark from Hatch in the back yard.  Then, very faintly, from the house next door, came the sound of breaking glass.  Enid’s pen hovers.  She tells herself that if she doesn’t hear anything else, then she didn’t hear anything to start with.  Just a trick of the light on the ears, as she sometimes told Galf.  Not that he ever believed her, but he let her alone about those secret things only she had seen.

Except she can’t hear, can’t listen for anything with Galf pushing himself back from the table and pawing through the cabinets.  Dragging legs and creaking wood and she can’t think.  Were the Sattlers supposed to be back this Friday or next?  It’s Tuesday anyhow, and the Sattlers were due back around lunch—with time enough to nap off their travels and still have themselves a rousing weekend instead of doing the piles of laundry and stacks of dishes they’d left behind. 

Lucky brats, like she and Galf had once been: twenty-something and childless.  No more than children themselves, really.  Teenaged toddlers with all the bright-eyed hope of knowing bad things could happen, and bad things could happen to them, but all bad things could be beaten.  Enid thought the last was the saddest part.  And it was probably the reason why she had gone over to tidy up, but had she locked the back door when she was done?

“Galfrey—”

“Toot-sweet, Niddie.”

Enid dropped back against the couch.  She hadn’t realized she’d begun to push herself up, but that name pushed her back as forcefully as if Galfrey’d put his fat hand on her shoulder.  Warm and gentle, that hand always was.  Quicker than darts, too—could catch a fly out of thin air without harming its wings.  He’d stopped his noise-making, but she can’t find him with her five senses, or the extra two to three that come along when you’ve been married for as long as the children of Israel had wandered the desert. 

Was he peeking out the window over the sink, his nose pressed against it, smudging the glass she’d just cleaned?  Was he by the storm-door out back with Hatch at the heel, his knuckles white at the collar and fingers deep in silver fur?  She would have seen him cross the hall.  She should have seen him, but…  The old blinkers got blurry when she was thinking hard, so how could she be sure?

Hatch had only barked once.

There had only been that one sound. 

Just the one. 

So faint it could have been a mistake. 

A tinkle-chime like the bells in movies, signaling something magic had happened.  That had to mean something, right?  It had to mean she was fretting over nothing, like the old woman she was.  An old woman who had seen too much and maybe not said enough.

Toot-sweet, Niddie.

No bullshit.  Not that those exact words would ever cross Galfrey’s mouth.  Just like he’d never tell her to shut up.  But those three words could mean that.  Those three words could mean anything—and they always meant he was serious.  And there was something else, too. 

He had the gun.