The Secret: A Short Story with A Twist

It feels like ages since I’ve shared a short story here on the blog so today is the day to change that.

I hope you enjoy it.

The Secret

I lay in the darkness listening as the rain pours down outside of my window. I imagine it running down the glass and bouncing up off the ground.

I wish it could cleanse me the way it cleanses the dirt and mud from the pavements. I wish it could wash me clean the way it washes the muddy deposits from my car.

But it can’t. Because I have a secret. A secret that is dirtier than the dust gathering on my furniture. A secret that is eating me up on the inside where water can’t reach.

A secret that I fear may kill me if I don’t talk about it, but will end my life in other ways if I do.

It all started the day my husband of ten years got made redundant. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. We had enough money to see us ok for at least a year, and my career was flourishing.

But it was a big deal. At least to him.

He spiralled into self-destruction and within three months he was a raging alcoholic. He was never abusive, but it got me down to watch him change from someone self-confident, attractive and fun to be around to a shadow of his former self.

To someone who sat around in stained clothes, the smell of his unwashed body permeating the air around him. To someone who’s only solace came in a bottle.

I tried to help him. Really I did. I arranged counselling but he wouldn’t attend. I would pour out the drinks he had stashed around the house, but he always found more.

I held him, talked to him, reassured him, but it was like he was in another world. A world where I no longer existed. A world where the next drink was his only focus.

Gradually, my love for him changed into something different; an anchor keeping me rooted to the spot.

Instead of getting butterflies in my stomach when I saw him, I got a leaden balloon weighing me down. Instead of being with him lifting me up and making me feel invincible, I began to feel like he was dragging me down with him and making me invisible.

The feelings I had for him, the feelings I thought would never go away, turned into contempt, anger and even hatred.

One morning, I woke up to find myself alone. That was nothing new. It was often too much effort for him to drag himself out of his drunken stupor long enough to tackle the stairs.

I went downstairs and there he was. Sitting in his favourite armchair, snoring loudly. In his hand was a three quarters empty bottle of rum. His lap, feet and the floor around him were soaked in vomit and I felt myself gag on the stench.

In that moment, something in me changed. I knew I could no longer live this life.

I reached out, shaking him roughly by the shoulder. Touching him made me want to recoil, but I didn’t. I shook him harder and harder. He groaned but didn’t open his eyes. I shook him again and the rum bottle started to slip from his grip.

His eyes flew open and he clutched at his life line, determined to not let a drop of it spill away the way he had allowed our love to slip away without even the smallest of cares.

I knew I had made the right decision.

His bleary, red rimmed eyes looked in my direction, but they didn’t see me. They looked through me as though I wasn’t there. His only movement was the slow lazy blink of his eyes and his hand bringing the bottle to his mouth.

I waited until he had downed a couple of gulps. I was no competition for the bottle and I needed him to hear what I had to say. Really hear it.

He slurred something at me. Something I think was asking if I was going to work. I wanted to scream at him, to ask him why the hell I should go to work to fund his drinking habit.

Instead, I calmly spoke one sentence.

“I want a divorce.”

I saw a flicker of something in his usually dead eyes. Regret? Sadness? I’d like to think so but the truth is probably sadder. I think it hit him for the first time that without me, he would have no way to finance his habit.

He dragged himself to his feet, the effort clear to see. As he stood before me in a ripped t-shirt with a stain on the front, struggling to remain on his vomit covered legs, I knew I had made the right choice. The man I loved no longer existed.

He swayed from side to side for a second, then he took a step towards me. His hand was raised, pointing at me to underline a point he was making that was lost in a sea of slurring.

He took another step and that’s when it happened.

Everything went into slow motion. He tripped. His arms pin wheeled, the rum bottle finally leaving his hand. His eyes opened comically wide as he fell.

I watched, unfeeling as he tumbled to the floor. I still felt absolutely nothing as his head connected with the side of the coffee table. I watched, a casual observer, as he rolled and came to rest on his back, his eyes closed, unconscious, a thick stream of blood running from the gaping wound above his left eye.

I stood watching him, like a critic watching a movie, as he retched. I watched as a thin stream of vomit came from his mouth.

I listened to his gargling chokes as more vomit tried to escape. I’m not entirely sure if the fall had knocked him out, or if it was just the drink as usual, but he was so heavily unconscious that his body had no fight left in it.

He didn’t roll over; he didn’t even turn his head to the side. He just laid there, choking and gasping.

I watched as his face turned pink then deep red. I watched it go to an angry purple. His mouth gaped open and closed like a demented goldfish as he tried to breathe around the wetness drowning him.

At the last second, his eyes flew open. The whites hadn’t been white for a long time, but this time, they weren’t just blood shot, they were pure red. The red of someone who has burst multiple blood vessels.

I could have pushed him onto his side. I could have called an ambulance. But I didn’t. I just stood there.

His eyes met mine and in his last couple of seconds, I’d like to say he knew. I’d like to say I saw a flash of the man I loved, but no.

The last thing my husband did wasn’t a death bed plea for forgiveness. It wasn’t even about survival. The last thing he did was twitch his fingers towards the spilt rum by his side.

His bulging eyeballs glazed over, and his heaving chest stopped moving. I stayed there, watching for what felt like an eternity, but couldn’t have been more than five minutes.

He didn’t move again.

I stepped over his feet and retrieved my handbag from the end of the bannister and went to work. I got through my day in the same manner as any other work day.

When I arrived home that night, I called an ambulance. I gave the performance of a life time. I cried, telling them I had come home from work and found my husband, the love of my life, unmoving, unconscious.

The ambulance didn’t take long to arrive and confirm what I already knew. I was free.

It was no secret he had slipped into heavy drinking in our social circles and my friends and family rallied to support me in my new role as grieving widow.

I would wail that I should have done more; I should have saved him. They would tell me there was nothing I could have done. If only they knew. But they don’t know and they never will.

His death was recorded as an accidental overdose or something like that. The levels of alcohol in his blood were enough for anyone to conclude this was a tragic accident. And to anyone who didn’t know how I had stood over him and watched him die, it was a reasonable conclusion.

The picture they painted of someone so intoxicated they would have been almost blind, stumbling over, knocking themselves out on the coffee table and then drowning in their own vomit was exactly how it went down.

I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I had a new lease of life, but I was careful. I played my part well and my journey through my grief played out slowly. But eventually, I was expected to pull myself together and get on with my life.

And that’s exactly what I did. I was happy again, and it wasn’t long before I fell in love again.

Falling in love with Danny, feeling like a teenager again, feeling like myself, told me I’d done the right thing.

If I’d saved him, I would never have been free of him. I would have always been the woman who left her husband when he really needed her instead of the woman who stood by him and did her best.

Danny and I went out for dinner tonight. He proposed to me and I said yes.

Now I lay in bed beside him, his seed drying on my thighs, his arm resting around my waist, heat radiating off him and washing over me in waves. His deep breathing lulls me into a peaceful place.

I know he’s the one. I know he will make me happy. I know I love him.

But I know something else as well. I know I have a secret. A dirty secret that he can never find out.

A secret that I am ashamed of. A secret that haunts me in the dead of night when the world around me is sleeping and I am awake, plagued with reruns of that fateful morning running through my head.

When I think about it, I can’t stop the tingle of excitement running down my spine. The tingling sensation caresses my skin, teases me, excites me.

It reminds me of the feeling of ultimate power that was bestowed upon me in that moment. The power that came from knowing I could have saved a life but instead chose to watch its light die out.

It pulls me back into the moment when I watched my husband’s eyes glaze over, his body as dead on the outside as I felt on the inside.

I think of that power and the tingle I felt at the time. Not on my spine but somewhere entirely more private.

I think of the feelings of power, excitement and freedom swirling through me and I relive it.

I reach across and stroke Danny’s cheek. He stirs slightly, his arm pulling me in closer to him as he falls back into sleep.

He can never know my secret.

He can never know that although I love him so much it’s like a physical ache inside of me, that sometimes, I allow myself to imagine a scenario where I stand by and watch the life drain out of him.

He can never know that sometimes, I have fantasies where he lays helpless and dying, begging me to save him.

He can never know that I don’t help him. I stand there and watch as he dies before me.

He can never know my secret.

What did you think? Did you enjoy the story? Let me know in the comments 🙂

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