View ImageHoney, Soft and Slow
She said her name soft and slow–the same way she took my hand, “Honey…”
Her fingers felt hollow, fragile like glass. I made an effort to handle her with care. The smoke from a dozen Chesterfields and Pall Malls parted around her, as eager to treat her gently as I was.
My other hand was a vice around the chilled glass that held middle-shelf scotch — a small gift after a hard day of work.
Honey spoke again. Every word sunk in and drifted away. I only nodded, maintained eye contact and smiled in rhythm to her song.
Her laugh harmonized with the clink of the ice in my glass as I lifted it to my lips.
She ordered a dirty martini and told me her life as she swirled the cheap, sword-shaped toothpick that pierced the olives. The brine in her drink spread and spun in patterns, like the smoke, like her voice. The story was the same as anyone else — she needed the money, had hit a rough patch and never intended it all to get to where it was. Her eyes were diamonds when the water began to well on their surface and she told me about the beatings and the concealer, about how it took more than an hour to look the way she did and wished she could be normal again.
I nodded at all the right spots.
At the end of the song, she pulled away and stood. My stomach lurched as if I'd been thrown off a cliff and another wrinkled bill emerged. That fragile hand returned to mine, and another martini mixed while she waxed about the farm and the well-meaning family.
The dance went go on for days, maybe weeks--bleeding into a single stretch, one bill at a time. Until that night she leaned in, brought her vodka-drenched breath to my lips and slipped the cold steel into my hand. She told the story of her prison and of her keeper — the man who chain-smoked nearest the door with a scowl to cut glass. He made my ears go hot and my lips go dry.
The ice had melted in my drink, but the room grew colder the more she begged me to free her — explained to me that she slipped each bullet into the revolver herself — it would be on her head.
I found my legs and stood.
I found my courage and ignited a spark in the metal of that gun.
The world went quiet except for her clinking the ice against her glass.
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