Midnight Raid

If you come home from work early, enter your living room to find DVDs in front of the TV that weren’t there when you did your laundry. If you need the laundry, need it now. If now you enter the kitchen, find hot cocoa on the counter, the counter you scrubbed earlier that day while waiting for your laundry. If you know full-well he hasn’t seen your papers, hasn’t a clue, but you’re testing his response. If his response is, “I’m just about to take a bath.” If you open the fridge and find a carton of milk, though the fridge has been empty for weeks. If you walk into the living room, pass your grandmother’s rocker where you prayed on the rosary, Get thee behind me Satan, get thee behind me. If you find him in the hallway guarding the bedroom door, shirt off as is his habit when lounging at home. “Just like my uncle,” he says about his no shirt style that used to turn you on, but you haven’t seen his chest in months. If he stands silent as you pass him toward the bathroom where you hung your laundry. If you’ve been checking on him for weeks, his book bag, pockets, the trunk of his car. If now your clothes aren’t hanging there. If you turn toward the den, see your clothes on the daybed, turn toward him but he blocks the bedroom door. If you smack his face so hard he steps backward as you push the door open to find the room clear from clutter, absent Magic cards, book of spells, comic books, graphic novels, all he’s been collecting for his eBay business. If you didn’t clean the room. If a single candle lights the nightstand. If at the end of the bed a woman pulls on her blouse and you call her a whore, then smack her as he pulls the woman toward the front door while grabbing his laptop, the one you share for business. If you yank it back. If he calls you a psycho as he protects the woman out the front door while you scream, not caring if the neighbors hear, “The Frank Miller painting is mine!” If into the cold November night they go. Pull out your cell phone, call the cops, be the first to make the report.

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Laura Sweeney facilitates Writers for Life in Iowa and Illinois. She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist's Conference in Oslo, Norway. Her poems and prose appear in seventy plus journals and twenty-three anthologies in the States, Canada, Britain, Indonesia, and China. Her recent awards include a scholarship to the Sewanee Writer's Conference. She is a PhD candidate, English Studies/Creative Writing, at Illinois State University.