The wife crept onto the back porch, careful to close the screen door shut behind her. She moved with muted steps from the pleasant air of her unpleasant house and into the world of her backyard. The outside was no better. With little thought or warning, the blistering heat sprang upon her with biting teeth. It buzzed and nipped on her freckled skin, ripping the breath from her lungs. Her head spun, but she was not sure if it was from the hot summer air or the swelling bruise around her eye.
She eased herself down the splinter stairs before sitting on the bottom step. She stared with her one good eye at the dread grass, wondering when her husband would regrow the lawn. He said he would do it last year, during the spring. It was one of the promises he threw into the air and, when they fell to the ground, let die. He did that a lot-- convincing himself that she would never remember these things. It would have worked too if she could find it within herself to stop hording memories. But sometimes, in dejected moments like these, memories were all she had.
She looked down at the plastic bag she had placed on her lap, the one meant for her eye. Inside a tray worth of ice cubes were cooling with a paper towel. Some water pooled at the bottom. Their chill seeped through the plastic and the fabric of her jeans, reaching her skin and cooling her blood. Was that why her legs were shaking?
She tugged the bag open. When she was a child, younger than how she felt now, she used to suck on ice cubes during the July heat.
She placed one in her mouth. She wanted to be a child again.
The screen door opened and closed with a loud thwack.
“Babe, where are you?”
The woman did not answer. Her mouth was frozen.
The husband’s feet pounded the splinters back into the wood with each step down the stairs, bringing himself closer to her.
“There you are. Why didn’t you answer me?”
The ice was starting to melt.
He sat next to her hip and snaked an arm around her shoulder, holding her close to his sweat-dampened shirt.
“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I know that I said that I wasn’t going to do it again. I promise this time I wouldn't. Not ever again. And you know, I’ve been thinking. You’re the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. I don’t want to lose you. I’m going to go into anger management therapy. I'm serious about this. I don’t want to hurt you again. In fact, I’ve already started to look a few places up.”
Water started to replace more and more of the ice.
“Well babe, what do you say? I promise to do better.”
There was just a little piece left.
“Do you forgive me?”
The ice cube was finished.
The wife was forced to swallow the watery remains. They went with sluggish difficulty down her throat.
She told him she did.
The husband kissed her, hard, bringing her mouth out of the numbed glory and back into the swampish heat. He disregarded the inflating eye he had given her as he attempted to suck her memories out from her mouth. He told himself that it worked, that she would never remember what happened that day.
But it did not. The wife still knew her husband was a liar.
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