Pretty Little Thing

            Donna leaned against the door jam looking into the room where her husband was sleeping. Just from looking at her you would think she was no older than sixteen. Her pre-pubescent figure was potato-sack-shapeless. The cotton T-shirt she wore to bed, a faded blue Superman shirt, hung lifeless off her pointed shoulders where the tips of her hair dangled down from her pigtails. Donna took a long drag from her Camel Light 100 every time Sam took a breath.

            Sam came home drunk, again, like every night before that. And, like every night before, Donna noticed the same shade of lipstick smudged on Sam’s neck. Donna stood in the doorway and smoked and pictured lipstick stuck to the face of the poor slut who put it there. She pictured her to be young, something that most attracted Sam to a woman. The younger the better. Donna saw the two of them at the bar, Sam putting fives and tens on the counter, trying to keep the dumb slut interested. And Donna puffed and imagined herself standing over the two of them, drunk and reeking, sheets covered in dried cum. She imagined pulling the poor harlot’s shiny straw hair, ripping her away from her soiled dreams, and opening her throat with the tip of a chef’s knife, proud and shining.

            Donna smoked and leaned and imagined. Sam slept and sweated and foamed at the mouth. It was four in the morning and Donna hadn’t slept a wink. In fact, she hadn’t had a night’s rest in weeks, maybe months. She had lost track of time. Donna spent her days in their apartment, cleaning and brooding, while Sam answered phones and checked files for a drowning carpet company. Donna would often catch herself daydreaming while scrubbing dust off the shelves or vacuuming the rug, about Sam drowning too, stuck at the bottom of a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Sometimes she imagined him drowning at the bottom of their bathtub, but she always went back to cleaning.