The Fable Issue 4

until I hit the top of the stairs leading up to my apartment. I could see that the drapes were still pulled shut. I looked back down at the carport and I could see Hayley’s old dented Honda Civic parked in her usual spot. Part of me was hoping she had split for the day, but the other part of me was saying fuck it. It was time for me to deal with her bullshit.

I slid the key into the deadlock, snapped it to the right, and pushed open the door. The mid-day sun rushed past me, flooding the room with glare. Hayley lay curled up on the black leather couch, my favorite red fleece covering everything but her face. The glow from the TV cast a sickly blue light that made her look like something from The Walking Dead. A half empty bottle of wine and a rainbow of pills littered the coffee table. The place smelled like cats, booze and cheap perfume.

I pulled back the curtains and opened the windows as far as they would go so I could get some light and oxygen back in the room.

“Jesus, Hayley, I thought you weren’t going to do this anymore. Who was that asshole?”

“Nobody…just some guy from the club. He wanted some company.”

“Got it. So how much cash will I find in your wallet if I check?”

“Fuck you, I’m not a whore. You’re such an asshole.”

“Right. I’m the asshole. Then if it’s not about money, what is it? You don’t have enough friends?”

“You don’t fucking get it, do you? You’re such a selfish prick.”

“Let me get this right. You’re pissed at me?”

Of course she was mad at me. It seemed that she lived in a perpetual state of fuck you, with every element of her being constantly screaming at me: antsy feet, clenched fists, steel-hinged jaw, cynical eyebrows—all punctuated by her venomous words. After living with Hayley for six months, I knew this wasn’t some dramatic act.

The only reprieve from her ongoing vitriol was the passionate insanity of our first endless days together followed by the first few weeks of her abbreviated pregnancy. Maybe it was the fact that I was ecstatic she was pregnant, not put out by the prospect of being chased down for the next eighteen years for child support. She had spent two days preparing how to break the news to me, girding herself for the full force of my resentment. She nearly fell over when all she got from me was a smile and a hug.

My first wife had left me two years earlier, our marriage a slow motion catastrophe. I was