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Assignment: No argument, no anger, no remorseThe door slammed! An almost imperceptible brain tick before I saw I was on the outside of it, standing on the top step. I slammed the door? Whoa! Or maybe it was him? I hadn't heard the deadbolt shutting me out though, so maybe not. I pressed down the latch and pushed. The door gave. I stepped up over the ledge and into the square high-ceilinged, dimly lit foyer, looked up five beige-carpeted stairs and down the long hall. A narrow gleam of light beneath a white door, just barely ajar. Behind the door, a television muttered and occasionally raised its voice; no other sound, as if death lived there.
I withdrew my eyes, called them back to where I stood. I turned, set my thumb lightly on the latch and paused. The letter slot. I had forgotten the key which for years I had taken to lock the door behind me when I left, sliding it through the metal slot and waiting till I heard the ch-chink as it landed, invariably it seemed, on bare stone tile, just missing the rug mat that was supposed to muffle the sound. My mind tripped a recording, part of the 'leaving' ritual: No, never mind, no need for you to stir yourself, I can see myself out, I heard myself say. He always looked so comfortable when it came time for me to go. His eyes thanked me, tearing themselves away from the news to do so. His body, taking me at my word, relaxed more deeply into its easy chair.
We had had words this time, and unforgivable actions. My eyes flashed, seeing it again. The injustice of it! Not cruelty, not as such, nor physical violence. But he had gone beyond, beyond... well, there is a story he liked to tell me in his language, translating it so I could understand; I myself knew it as an idiom, the one about the straw breaking the camel's back.
The key. It was right, it was just, it was the best way to end it. I opened the door, stepped down to the porch, gathered my strength and slammed the door, feeling the reverberations warm my hand. With my left hand I opened the letter slot as far as it would go, then jerked my fingers away to let it fall back. It had a good reflex action, that slot, and the high, sharp, metal clang and chatter set my teeth on edge, but it felt satisfying all the same-I had wanted to do that more than once. I slap-slid my hands off each other a half-dozen times. Seven years it had been. Seven years. Poof!
I turned and walked down the steps and to the street and turned right. It was over. I was leaving for the last time, even my bones knew it.
I think I smiled, perhaps in the way a felled tree might smile when it lands on the forest floor, before it is shorn of what remains of its branches, before it is chained to a host of other fallen trees and transported and shoved in the river; before it finds itself, by some lucky break, free of the pack, free of all further responsibility to act like a log in service to humanity, free to float and flow and just be. Thinking of the price it paid, of its life-in one form, at least. Except... do trees think? I expect not. I like to think they live in the moment-no past, no future, no regrets. No longings for things to be different than they are.
