True Short Story: Dont Go To Bed Angry With Your Wife
I’m not even going to tell you what the fight was about.
Why should I? It doesn’t matter. Nobody had a secret second family; neither of us were spending all our money behind the other’s back. When you get married, a lot of people will offer unsolicited warnings. “You’re going to fight so much,” they’ll say. (Aunt Deb may have been projecting slightly.) But what they don’t tell you is just how domestic these arguments will be. In such close and constant proximity, the smallest resentments can fester like a battle wound in a muddy trench.
Truth be told, Allie and I don’t even fight that much. Many of our friends view us as “couple goals,” or so they tell us. We’re deeply in love, despite our differences in loading the dishwasher.
Still…you can only watch a woman load the dishwasher wrong so many times, right? The plates don’t go like that.
Among the garbage heap of bizarre advice and stale sex quips a couple will hear on their wedding day, one precious gem lies hidden, often going unheeded precisely because it’s repeated so often: “don’t ever go to bed angry.” It’s good guidance. I will give it myself someday, maybe even the next time I attend a wedding. But…when I look that happy couple in their eyes, I won’t just tell them not to go to bed angry. I’m going to tell them why.
It’s not about keeping that wound un-festered, despite what you might think. It’s about avoiding the small man in the silk hat. It’s about keeping him as far away from your home as possible. Because if he finds you…
Well. I suppose that’s around where the happy couple will stop me. Look at me like I’m crazy. If they’ve hired security, perhaps they’ll even show me to the door.
But at least they won’t be able to say I didn’t warn them.
Again — I’m not going to tell you what the fight was about. Stop asking.
You need only know that by the time 10:00 pm rolled around, Allie was lying in bed, fuming, and I was downstairs, calmly sipping from a glass of Jameson on rocks, assessing the situation with a logical, cool head, and — fuck it, who am I kidding. I was fuming too.
God damn, you can get mad during those twelve-rounders. Lila, our three-year-old beagle, watched me with mild interest as I paced back and forth in the dining room, perhaps wondering if I’d gone too nuts to feed her in the morning. My own concern was wrapped up in a frantic replay of the argument. Imagine a sportscaster, analyzing a highlight in slow motion: “Now, Jim, watch carefully as he says that really dickish thing. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, but that’s CLEARLY in response to the bitchy thing SHE just said…”
It wasn’t going very well. I’d been horrible, and I knew it. Briefly, I considered going upstairs to apologize. But there were two obstacles: I still thought I was right, and I’m an asshole. So instead, I decided to go on a nighttime run to clear my head.
I laced up my shoes too tight. I’d pulled the strings a little harder than usual, and didn’t realize it until I made it out to the sidewalk. Of course, I thought bitterly. Can’t even enjoy a run in peace. With some shame, I admit to you that it never crossed my mind to crouch down and loosen my shoelaces.
Still, exercise is healing, and it wasn’t long before my focus was on my breath, my arms pumping, the slap slap slap of my shoes against the asphalt. After a mile, I had trouble remembering why I was mad. After three, I’d forgotten entirely. When I finally completed my loop, four and a half miles later, I was ready to go upstairs and apologize.
So ready, in fact, that I forgot to lock the front door when I re-entered my home.
But when I reached our bedroom, I found my dear wife asleep — or pretending. Either way, the fight was over for the night, and we were going to bed angry for the first time in our three years of marriage. Quietly, I grabbed my pillow from the bed and retreated to the guest room, feeling more sad than I expected to.
The next morning found Allie and I brushing our teeth next to one another at the bathroom counter. Neither of us were cold, exactly, but we were unusually cordial — more often than not, one of us will playfully smack the other’s butt during tooth-time. There was no butt-touching today. We knew the fight couldn’t resume before we left for work, and we knew it would resume that night.
Allie spit out her toothpaste, then cupped her hands under the faucet and filled them with water. She slurped the water from her hands, and then — I had glanced at her at this exact moment, so I saw it all — she looked back up into the mirror, and her eyes bugged out. The water sprayed from her mouth and she spun, backed against the wall, screaming and pointing toward the corner of the room.
“OH MY GOD OH MY GOD!! THERE’S SOMEONE THERE TURN AROUND!!”
She didn’t need to tell me twice. I wheeled around, and I thought if I opened my mouth my heart might fall out. But there was nobody there. Allie had collapsed to the floor, back against the wall, sobbing and pointing.
“He was there, he was right there, oh my God…”
“Al, there’s no one,” I said in disbelief, wondering if this was some kind of trick. I crouched down to take her face in my hands. She was shaking uncontrollably. She couldn’t look at me — she kept her eyes plastered to the corner of the room.
“He was … standing right there,” she wept. “He was … I swear … I swear I saw…”
“I know,” I said, even though I did not know at all. “It’s okay. He’s gone now.” After a moment, I pulled Allie to her feet and discovered that I was wrong. She glanced in the mirror and her face collapsed. She screamed again.
“NO, NO, NO!” She didn’t even look behind us this time. She bolted out of the room so fast that she knocked my head against the wall. I looked in the corner again, half expecting to see someone this time.
But there was nobody there.
Neither of us ended up at work that morning. When Allie finally calmed down, she told me what she had seen. A man, small in stature, crouched in the corner of our bathroom. He wore a silk top hat and fancy clothes, like he was a guest at some kind of Victorian dinner. She did not describe his face, other than to say it would never leave her memory, not until the day she died.
After a few minutes, I suggested that we look at our smart doorbell footage from the night before. Thinking it would put Allie’s mind at some kind of ease before we left for work. It did not.
We fast-forwarded through the evening. 7:00 pm. 8:00 pm. Finally, I stepped out onto the porch and left for my run.
“I didn’t know you left,” Allie said absently.
11:00 pm. I returned, dripping sweat. Midnight. All was as it should have been for a while longer.
It wasn’t until 3:17 am that he stepped onto our porch.
He was exactly as Allie had described him. Much smaller than me, but with a top hat that shone in the moonlight — silk, it looked like. He wore a suit that was not quite a tuxedo, but that may have been a precursor to one. And his face was memorable indeed. He looked directly at the doorbell camera, for just a second or two. He knew we were watching and he didn’t care. The man in the hat reached out his hand to open our door, and he stepped inside our home.
We never actually talked through that fight, in the end. We’d been brought together by the morning’s events, like soldiers who bickered in the barracks before uniting against a common enemy.
An enemy who, as it happened, was nowhere to be found.
It’s a common trope in horror stories for a wife — more spiritually attuned than her husband, perhaps — to witness something supernatural, some infraction of nature, only for the man to think she’s gone crazy. Allie and I might have trod a similar path, were it not for that footage. That was indisputable.
And yet, it turns out that there’s only so much the police can do when their suspect vanishes into thin air.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned.” Thus spake Detective Maher, a man who, despite his general uselessness, looked and sounded exactly like something out of a hard-boiled paperback. He looked at the doorbell footage on the laptop again. “Just walks right in, don’t he?”
“He do,” Allie responded with a tone. Still frightened, of course, but I’ve never met an English teacher who could abide such a usage error.
The detective chewed his lip like it was Dentyne, then clapped his hands and said, “Welp. We’ve, uh, already given the place a once-over, but I’ll have my men run it through one more time. In the meantime…” he pulled out a card and handed it to me. “You ring me straight away if you see him again.”
We stared at him, dumbfounded. “That’s it?”
“Well, what the—” Maher held out his hands, as if to say he thought we were in the process of crucifying him. But he thought better of whatever he was going to say. “Procedure’s been followed here, sir. We’ve taken statements. Copied your security footage. Searched your house, and good. That man ain’t here. Now, we’ll put out an APB, and we’ll increase our patrol frequency in this area. Hell, I’ll even park someone in front of your place tonight.”
“He was in our bathroom,” Allie said through gritted teeth and tears. “Tell him!” She looked at me imploringly. But I had already told him — Allie saw the man, and only in the mirror. I hadn’t seen him at all.
That night, we invited Chelsea and Charles over. Chelsea was a longtime friend of Allie’s, and I could bond well enough over sports with her husband, even though he could be a bit loud and his parents had named him Charles about a century too late. The happy couple had obviously been fighting before they came over, so Charles and I drank and watched a game absently while the girls huddled on the other couch, commiserating about the day’s bizarre events.
Sometime in the seventh inning, I stood to grab Charles and myself another round of beers from the fridge. I cracked the first bottle top, and as I moved to crack the second…
“BITCH!!” A harsh male voice rang from upstairs, freezing us all in place. For a moment, there was a perfect snapshot of fear.
The rest is a blur. The bottle slipped from my hand and shattered on the floor. The girls screamed. And — I might have imagined this, or concocted it in retrospect — but had a third female been screaming at the same time? I leapt over the suds and broken shards and bolted up the stairs, taking them three at a time.
I barged into the master bedroom first. Nothing. I snatched the home-defense baseball bat from the side of my nightstand and began to prowl through the rest of the upstairs. The voice had come from here. There was no question of that. I only wondered which room I’d have to scatter the man’s brain across.
I can only explain what happened next by noting that — as you might expect — I was absolutely wired. The adrenaline was something animal. I was trailing blood all across our carpet (I hadn’t quite cleared the bottle shards on my flight upstairs) and didn’t have a clue.
So when I entered Allie’s office and caught a glimpse of something against the wall to my left, I didn’t hesitate. I cut the bat viciously through the air and shattered Allie’s full-length body mirror. I had swung at my reflection. Right at my face.
But I didn’t feel foolish about it. No.
How could I, when in the split second before impact, I’d seen — in the mirror — a silk hat perched atop my own head?
“They’ve been fighting a lot,”Allie told me in bed. “Chelsea and Charles. Ever since.”
Referring, of course, to a couple weeks before, the night when I sliced my foot and broke the mirror. Our friends couldn’t have left fast enough.
“They always fight a lot,” I say, eyes fixed on my phone. “They’re married, after all.” I expected at least a pity laugh from Allie. I didn’t get one.
“Not like this,” she said. “The things he’s been saying to her…”
“What’s he said?”
“It’s…ugh. It’s not so much what he’s said. It’s the way he’s said it.” Allie sounded deeply troubled, though I didn’t pick up on that until the conversation ended a few seconds later.
“Loud and obnoxious?” I asked with a slight grin. “Cause that’s not exactly out of the ordinary for Charles, babe, that’s par for the course.”
“No, it’s like he’s…” Allie paused, then processed my sarcasm and sighed. “Just forget it.”
Months passed, and nothing else happened that was strange. Allie and I didn’t fight much at all in those months. A Pavlovian response to the horrific events following our last big row, perhaps. But we weren’t complaining. Actually, we barely even thought about it. Things were back to normal.
For us, at least. Chelsea had kicked Charles out of the house.
I didn’t know too much about what had gone on between them. I didn’t care to. I imagine they went to bed angry many times. Allie, of course, knew every detail, and Chelsea was at our house more often than not. Neither Allie nor I had seen Charles since the night I broke the mirror. We assumed he was out of our lives for good.
He was not.
It was roughly 11:30 on a Friday night. I sat on the couch with Allie’s feet propped up on me. On the other side of me, Chelsea sat with our dog Lila perched in her lap, happily receiving pets and ear scritches. We were watching a movie – the girls loved kids’ movies, and had had their hearts set on Meet the Robinsons, for whatever reason. I had a beer in hand and was too buzzed to mind much.
THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD.
Lila’s ears shot straight up. Someone was at the front door. And judging by the ferocity of the knock, they did not sound hap—
THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD.
It was not the smart rap of knuckles; it was the slamming of a closed fist. The girls whimpered on either side of me. Lila started to growl.
“What the fuck?” I muttered. I moved Allie’s legs off my lap and stood up. She clutched at me frantically, pulling me back down.
“No, don’t,” she began, but stopped short. Whoever stood on our porch was now ratting the handle on our door.
Trying to get in.
I stood up. Lila barked, a sharp, piercing yelp, which was then dwarfed by an almost indescribable roar of noise from the front door.
Charles had shot the doorknob.
Lila bolted up the stairs to safety. The three of us were not so fast. Charles was in the room before any of us could even find our footing. He brandished a gun and stood before us with crazed eyes, wearing a tuxedo and a silk top hat.
The suit was not quite the same as the small man’s from before. But the hat…it was the hat. It had to be.
“BITCH!” Charles roared, taking a step forward. “WHERE ARE YOU?!”
I wheeled around to find that Allie was clutching me tightly from behind. I hadn’t even noticed that. But Chelsea was nowhere to be seen. A whimper, from behind the second couch, gave her away.
Charles grinned maniacally and took another step forward. I pushed Allie aside and stepped in front of him.
“Don’t,” I said, hands up, pleading. “Let’s talk.”
“You’re a Red Sox fan,” he said, still grinning. “Other than that, I’ve got nothing against you. But I’ll shoot Allie if you don’t get the fuck out of my way.” He shifted the barrel of the gun so that it was pointing at my wife, who crouched near Lila’s crate.
I’d like to say that I at least weighed my options. But what options did I have? I was too far to reach him. He’d blow the love of my life away before I could even start toward him.
I stepped aside.
Charles walked past me to where Chelsea hid. She had time for half a scream before he put a bullet in her head.
There was a second or two of perfect silence after the shot. I lunged for him then, hoping to tackle him from behind. But I needn’t have bothered. Charles only had violent intentions toward one of us that night, and he’d already killed her.
He put a second bullet in his own head. He fell, and the silk hat landed perfectly, almost mystically, atop his sprawling corpse.
I won’t tell you about the rest of that hellish night. There’s only one other detail you need to know: somehow, by the time the police arrived, the hat had disappeared from Charles’s body. It never turned up. That was almost a year ago now, and things are decidedly not back to normal. Maybe they never will be again. And every time I dare to hope…I remember that fucking hat.
Let’s talk about last night instead.
Allie and I fought again. No, I won’t tell you what about. Why do you keep asking? Anyway, it wasn’t a huge deal. They rarely are, despite what they feel like at the time. It didn’t start with a dishwasher dispute, but it may as well have.
We’ve fought a few times since the night two bodies lay on our living room floor. These new fights are strange. They’re less intense, but they last longer. Think “simmer for five hours” instead of “bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low.” I suppose that’s because we don’t dare give each other space anymore.
How could we, after what happened the last time? When that hat is still God knows where?
We’re reduced to simmering in close proximity together. It can be torturous. But last night, after a long, tense silence, Allie busted out a deck of cards. She didn’t even say anything. Just sat down and started to deal.
I picked up my cards and looked at my wife, my life partner, across our dining room table. In our home. Our dog lay contentedly at our feet. There was a strange mixture of coldness and warmth resting between us that I think can only exist between two people who have started, for better and worse, to merge into one.
“Got any threes?” she asked, glancing at her hand.
“Go fish.”
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