A Cold Burnt Match

Black clouds cover the sky, rain smashing around me like a mournful night. As I walk down the road, silent as I ever been, I knew it was going to be a night. One that I’ll either remember or know to be my last.

It was only seven at night, yet I was cold as my dead cheating wife’s heart.

With a flick of the match, I light the tip of my cigarette with the cold flame, but it must be wet, you see. Cause it doesn’t stay lit.

Damn it. I haven’t had one in ages. Could not catch a break these days. This past week, I tried so hard to quit, but I couldn’t cut it. My desire was stronger than hers. Probably why it chased her away, and probably why I couldn’t keep away from smoking.

The rain really isn’t giving up. It’s making tonight bloody terrible. More so than it already is. Maybe I deserve it. Maybe it’s a sign from above letting me know to stay away. But I can’t. I won’t. Even now, the house stands proudly against my wishes. My memory is faint, but I knew one thing and one thing alone. This was where it happened, and it happened over coffee.

Strange, I’m sure. Even so, as I walked up to the front door, my gut told me something bad had happened. Maybe it was a friend. Maybe it could have been me who did wrong. It told me to look away. To leave. And trust me, I wish there was another way. A way I could change everything back to the way it was. But it was too late. No going back now. Even if I could, it would go against God himself. Who would be fool enough to do such a thing.

I step under the canopy of the house and knock on the door. It squeaks open with each knock. Strange, very strange.

The first room on the left was a reminder of the nights I’d wait up for her. Every night was agony, never knowing if she’d return.

I go further in, retracing every memorable step of my life, all the way to the bedroom. The one always smelling of cologne not owned by me. Every week was the same scent crawling under the sheets, but it was too late to have been work related. I had a pit in my stomach then. I have it here now too. Something was off.

I leave the room and head back the way I came, popping out another cigarette. This one dryer and most certainly better off lit than not. I flick a new match and take a long and very needed puff. By God, that is good.

With each step, my heart thumps louder and louder. As if it were a bouncing betty going off. Felt like it was going to tear me apart the closer I got to the kitchen. Why, I wonder, did it feel as if I were about to see what I feared was a possibility?

And then I saw it.

Lying on the floor. It looked like a scene from a movie. A man, laying on the floor next to her, blood smeared across their mouths. Damn it, so this is what it’s like. You think you’ve seen it all. And I foolheartedly believed I had.

Suddenly, the memories come flooding back to me. Now, I know why the flame was cold. Why I was cold. I didn’t want to believe it, any of it, but the truth was there on the floor.

She had the same thought as I. We both wanted out, and we wanted out no matter what. In the end, I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, but she found a way to poison my coffee the same way I poisoned hers.

Guess we were two peas in a pod, and it killed us both.