I’m not sure of the exact moment I decided to kill my husband. Maybe it was when we sat on the yard sale sofa watching television one evening, his snores prickling through the damp air; some newscaster lady with a whiny voice was talking about a murder. A psychopath, she said. Life in prison. Husband and three children dead. 

I had looked over at my own husband. Plaid shirt. Unshaven beard. Muddy work boots half untied. And I thought, if she could do it, why couldn’t I? 

Or maybe it was the day he got angry over an omelette. He threw my blue dish across the floor, turning the room bloody with his useless anger. Yellow egg yolk spread across the floor, surrounded by broken ceramic. I didn’t cry. I felt nothing except a deep hate where everyone else said love should be. 

All those little moments: finding those horrible dark scribbles on crumpled paper buried in the trash where he thought I couldn’t see; lying awake in the musty bed while he paced in the attic like a machine, his even footsteps like hammers hitting my head; the way he told me to get coffee like I wasn’t good for anything else. It’s all of it, I suppose, as I wring the dishcloth tightly, water dripping into the sink. I’ve been carrying around these thoughts for a long time. Now, standing by the window, looking out at the rotten tomato plants, I wonder what kind of poison would kill him the quickest. 

I hang the cloth on the handle of the stove and breathe in deeply. Smell of coffee permeating through the air. Flowered wall paper covering the surface of the dining room across the hall. Daniel’s footsteps, coming down the stairs. Ten o’clock and he’s only just waking up. I like to get up early, when the sun hasn’t risen yet, when the only thing I have to worry about is feeding the birds that like flying into my yard for a snack when it gets cold. 

Sometimes in the darkness, long before anyone sane is awake, I turn on one of the stove burners, watching as it makes that quick popping sound before the sudden whoosh of blue flame tinged with red. Flames dance and crackle, and I wonder what it feels like to be a force so strong you could burn down anything in your path, causing destruction and heartbreak in every place you visit. To be so tremendous, but trapped by weak beings you could easily eat alive if you only raged hard enough to break out of the cage they contain you in, used for whatever purpose they deem acceptable. On those mornings, I like holding my hand above the heat, lowering it slowly to see how much my body can take. How close I can get to the flame before it hurts too much. How I always stop before I get burned.

He’s in the kitchen now, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and I cannot stop my nails from digging into the skin on my arm. White claw marks are the only way I can get my anger out. There’s a thump on the barstool at the counter. Grimy hands tapping the marbled surface. A hungry look in his eyes, rimmed with red and heavy sleep, staring through me. He’s somewhere else, and so am I. In some other wonderful universe, I’m reaching for a gun. My hands wrapping around the cold metal and taking aim. Smiling wide as it registers on Daniel’s face that I’m far more dangerous than he ever could have imagined. Somewhere else, I watch as he takes his final breath, falls off the barstool, and gets blood on my hardwood floor. 

In this universe, the clock is ticking loudly, reminding me it’s not time yet. I need to be patient. There’s still so much to do. I bite my cheek, drawing out the sweet taste of blood, and sit the plate down in front of him. With the practiced facade of loyal perfectionism I’ve adopted to get what I want over the years, I twitter, “Here’s your breakfast, you misogynistic pig.”

Except that last part is only in my head. He gives a low grunt. “Gotta go into work today. Probably be back real late, don’t bother waiting up.” What a liar. I stay silent, watching as he dangles a piece of bacon from his fingers, grease dripping down onto the floor. I can’t stand the way he chews his food, mouth open, smacking like a barnyard animal, and I relish the thought of the awful light going out of his eyes. 

I stand and he sits, and with every horrible, slurping bite he takes, my skin gets tighter and tighter. My blood is boiling over, like a pot left on the stove for too long. Every other sound in the world fades away, and I can no longer hear the woosh of cars streaming past outside. No more birds swooping into the elm tree, their scattering chirps bouncing on the wind. No more high pitched whine of the dishwasher like a mosquito landing on your arm in July. Nothing except the sound of Daniel chewing bacon, mouth open and smacking. Saliva dripping out of his gaping red mouth and down his scratchy chin. Shoveling more and more into his mouth like a prisoner eating his last meal.  A man on death row, I think. Because that’s what he is. 

The proverbial last straw was a few days ago. It was mid afternoon, and the sun was boiling the air, trapping everything in bubbles of heat. I’m not sure what compelled me to dig it out of the trash, halfway hidden under spoiled apples and pencil shavings, but my ink-stained fingers curled around the crumpled paper and tugged. It was an unfamiliar handwriting, definitely not Daniel’s. Daniel’s handwriting is that of a messy and hurried middle schooler, and didn’t match the swirly cursive on this page. It was a phone number.  Someone had written “call me” and signed their name at the corner with a smiley face. 

Her name is Lea, and she could do so much better. She’s the woman whose perfume I smell on Daniel when he comes home hours after he should have gotten off of work at the construction site. He makes claims about a crazy boss, low wages, long and tedious hours. Am I supposed to believe him? Am I supposed to shrug it off like my mother did when she walked in on my father and his secretary in her own bed? She was a coward. She closed the door, went downstairs, and made a pot of coffee. Tears stung her eyes for the next ten years, and I was stuck in that house with my parents’ unhappiness and that dense fog of hate that seeped into every scorching minute of my adolescence until I was old enough to run. 

I am nothing like my mother. I’m not going to stand here in a flour-dusted apron and pour coffee for him with weak hands while I know he’s cheating on me. Except that’s exactly what I’m doing, isn’t it? I’m standing here, serving this a**h*le a home-cooked breakfast when I know perfectly well what’s going on. 

Poor, pathetic Lea. What in the world would she want with my useless hog of a husband? To be fair, what use do I have for my useless hog of a husband? If I feel anything at all towards her, it’s pity. Perhaps she’s in a bad situation, as I am. Perhaps Daniel has fed her lies, manipulated her, thrown his anger at her. Perhaps killing him would help the both of us. 

I’ve tried to leave before, of course I have. I tried to leave way back in the beginning of the whole thing, but the system is rigged and “he said, she said” never gets any woman far. I sat in that police precinct: phones ringing and keyboards clacking; an old woman crying in the corner; surrounded by men who knew nothing. Some man asking me to describe the incidents. Some man with a tired look in his eyes, barely listening as I told him about the fear, the hurt. He did not care, none of them do. So I have to take matters into my own tired hands. If that means I need to do some unsavory things to get him out of my life, then I will. 

I don’t think that makes me a bad person. I feel like I’ve simply gotten caught on the wrong side of this war. Generations of abuse; of secrets, lies- I suppose I’m finally fed up with all of it. I never loved Daniel. I married him out of convenience. For his money. We never had much of it growing up, my father was that stereotypical good-for-nothing drunk, and my mother had too many kids to raise. I always resented people with money. Their fancy cars, beautiful clothes… I wanted that life. So I resolved to get it. Daniel came along soon after I put myself through college. I had worked hard for so many years, but nobody wanted to hire me. So when I met this older man with the fancy house, I knew it was my opportunity to live the life I knew I truly deserved. That was before things went rotten. 

I agreed to marriage back when his career was at its height and the money was pouring in. I never knew what he did, not exactly. I had my suspicions, but to be perfectly honest, there was so much in his bank account that I didn’t care enough to question it. I knew he worked for the government, maybe did some things that weren’t exactly moral. He went off to work early in the morning and came back late in the evening, tired and filled with a thick fog I could never quite see through. The words we exchanged were fraught with tension. Guitar strings on the verge of snapping. But the luxuries that came with being married to Daniel were enough to push the discomfort from my mind, at least for a while.

About a year into our marriage, Daniel had come home angry at two in the morning, blood stains on his collared shirt. He smelled like smoke and had severe burns on his right leg. I had been scared. Terrified thoughts had flooded reasoning, and I panicked. I yelled at him. Why had he been out so late? Did someone hurt him? But even in my panic I knew another question was more likely: did he hurt someone? I had seen the anger in his eyes before, felt the disregard for other human lives in the way he screamed at me when things got bad. I knew what he was capable of. I just didn’t think he would be so careless. He was the kind of person that got away with things, someone who planned everything meticulously as so not to get caught. I knew that when he stomped up there in the attic, when he sat at that awful desk and wrote notes upon notes until the pencil was a stub, he was planning something. For his work? For me? I honestly do not know. He had always been so secretive: locks on cabinets, painful anger when I dared to open my mouth and ask a question. He was careful, controlling. The kind of man who knew what he wanted and knew how to get it. But he had messed up, I guessed. Someone had caught him off guard. And now he was standing in front of me with something in his eyes I had never seen before: fear. 

He would never tell me what actually happened that night, but afterwards there was no more high-profile job, no more fancy house, no more money to support the lifestyle I had grown accustomed to. We moved into some place in the suburbs and Daniel eventually found a job in construction and I cursed myself for being such an idiot. Why didn’t I have a backup plan? I had known that Daniel did some sketchy things during his time working for the government, but I had never considered what I would do if it all came tumbling down. I should have kept working, should have had my own bank account instead of being one of those stupid girls who rely on their husbands for every little thing. 

Even before he lost it all, these ideas had been twisting around in my mind, poisonous tendrils lashing around my thoughts and telling me that it would be so very easy, so very satisfying, to make the light go out of his eyes. I hated him so much, fixated on every little mannerism so much that it’s a wonder that our house didn’t collapse under the pressure of my loathing. I resisted, some guilty part of myself saying that it wasn’t moral, that I needed to resist the temptation of evil. But I wasn’t concerned so much with wrong and right as I was with the legal consequences.  I had no desire to spend my life rotting away in a prison cell. If I had to do this, and I was going to do this, I had to do it right. So I waited, but on that afternoon I found Lea’s note I realized I have waited long enough. I’ve dealt with enough shit from this man to fill a thousand lifetimes. It’s time for it to end.

There’s that slam of a fork on the counter as Daniel finishes his breakfast. I stare at him. Does he know what I’m capable of? Does he know he has limited time left to live? I wonder what I would do if I was sentenced to death. I’ve never been scared of death, not particularly. What I’m scared of is losing control. I don’t like the idea of being trapped. I’m not claustrophobic, never have been, what I mean is I’m afraid of being trapped in situations. All through my life I’ve felt trapped by my parents’ failed relationship, trapped by poverty, even after I graduated from college I was trapped in a busy world where useless people work their as**s of everyday without any decent payoff.  If I’m never going to go anywhere in life, I might as well do what I want.

I take the scraped-clean plate, placing it gently in the sink. I am the image of submission, perfection, everything Daniel wants in a wife. Except I’m not quite enough for him, am I? I’m not stupid, I know that Lea can’t be the only one. Nothing is ever enough for a man like Daniel. He could be crowned king of the world, showered in gold coins, and he still wouldn’t be satisfied. He doesn’t say a word to me as he shrugs on his coat and stumbles out the door.

For the rest of the day I’m surrounded by a kind of sour joy. My lungs are filled with sharp air, bringing clarity to my thoughts as I make all the preparations. I know some people in high up places, so obtaining all the right paperwork isn’t so hard. Who knew how easily you can change your identity when enough people owe you favors? 

I don’t know what time he’ll be home. It doesn’t matter. Seconds taste hot on my tongue as I sit on the sofa and wait. I bought the gun from an old woman in a rundown store in the bad part of town. That had been easy too. When she asked me what a young thing like me needed with a gun, I just said I had some things I needed to take care of. She seemed like the kind of woman who would understand, and I guess she did because here I am. Gun in my lap, fan stirring dust into the air, painting of a wide-eyed owl staring at me from the wall.    

There’s a key rattling in the lock now. Door knob twisting open. He walks inside, cold air tumbling into the living room. I let him hang his coat up and crack his knuckles before I make a noise. 

“Welcome home, dear.” He doesn’t even look at me when he asks if dinner is ready, just starts making his way into the kitchen, his back hunched and breathing raspy. I follow him slowly, gun behind my back, a demure smile on my face.

“Why don’t you sit down,” I say, gesturing towards the stool he sat at just this morning. He collapses onto it, burying his face into his hands and letting out a sigh.

“Roslynn, baby, bring me some dinner, will you?” I hate it when he calls me baby. 

“I’d really rather not.”

“What’d you say?” He looks up at me for the first time, anger simmering in his eyes.

“I said no, you a**h*le.”

His eyes are turning red now, and my smile gets wider as I pull out the gun, relishing the look of terror that comes over his face. Who’s weak now? 

“Wait, Rosie, please, what are you—”

I hear the shots ring loud and clear. Two bullets, straight through his chest. One heartbeat. Two heartbeats. Daniel, falling to the ground with a sick crack. Three heartbeats. I look down at my hand. Steady. Aren’t your hands supposed to shake when you kill your husband? Are you supposed to feel something other than relief? Four heart beats. He’s so still. Never has he been quite so still. But I suppose he’s never been quite so dead. Five heartbeats. A rushing laugh brushes through my lips, sounding hollow and triumphant. Six heartbeats. There aren’t any police sirens in the distance. The world hasn’t ended, the ceiling hasn’t come crashing down. There’s just the sound of my singular heartbeat, alone for the first time in years. I give Daniel one final look, and then I run.