Foreword from Bill:
Hello, Bill here. We all enjoy a bit of gelato every once in a while, but sometimes I enjoy a flavor that may be a bit much for others. Say… Pistachio with a tobasco sauce drizzle. I enjoy it, but you may want to stick to stracciatella. With that being said, this story contains heavy themes, read on if you’re ok with that.
Trigger Warning: Domestic Abuse, Profanity, Suicide, Violence.
An Angel in the Bathtub
Every Sunday evening, after coming home from work and eating dinner alone in front of the tv, Claire would take a bath. She’d sit in the tub for hours, until her fingers were nothing but pale raisins attached to her hands—only leaving the lukewarm contents of the bath when she finally remembered she had working bones. Her tailbone would begin to scream at her from where it stubbornly stayed at the hard bottom of the tub, and she’d laugh to herself.
Right. How could she forget? Her body, her goddamn body with its pain receptors and soft skin and synapses shooting fireworks into her brain, was alive.
Alive. Alive. Alive. Alive. Alive.
The word would ricochet through the fleshy maze of her brain until she got tired of it, and she’d pull herself from the soapy water out of spite. Claire did most things in life out of spite—she was like her mother in that regard. Only, Claire’s mother was dead, and she was not.
But this particular Sunday evening, a touch of incoming winter in the middle of a rainy fall, Claire sat in the tub as it filled with water, soap, and the color red. And as she watched the color bleed through the water like ink, it made her think of an octopus. Eight tentacles, beady strange eyes, and how they sprayed ink when they were frightened. But their ink was black not red, and they had three hearts, not one. Claire couldn’t imagine the weight that came with having two more hearts than she already did—she wondered if an octopus had ever contemplated suicide.
“Claire.”
She looked up.
An angel sat in the bathtub across from her, feathered wings pulled in tight against their back, even as they were half-way submerged in the bloody water. There was no golden halo, only tarnished gold strings of moppish hair falling around the angel’s face like a cage. And those eyes, dull and blue, like snow beginning to melt into the dirt on the side of the road—Claire knew this face.
“Mom,” she whispered.
The angel nodded, cage closing in on her face with shame.
Claire had grown up thinking angels were bright and kind, coming down from heaven with the lord’s light kissing the back of their wings.
She thought angels were supposed to be beautiful.
“Hi baby,” the angel said, voice softer than Claire’s pulse beating against her wrists. “It’s good to see you.”
Claire would scoff if she cared enough to, instead her chest merely heaved with exhaustion, the tip of her breasts breaching the surface of the smooth water. She didn’t care if her mom saw her like this, naked and bleeding out. In a sick twisted way, it brought her satisfaction that her mom was seeing her like this, in her last moments. It was how Claire saw her the last time they saw each other. She had found her mom dangling from the ceiling fan one day after school, swinging like the heavy pendulum of a clock—except her time had run out for good.
“Are you scared?”
“No.”
“You should be, you’re dying Claire.”
“Were you? Scared, that is?”
The angel shuddered, wings splashing in the water like they were trying to cleanse themselves of a memory. Something dark was matted between the angel’s feathers, the mysterious substance broke free into the water, mixing with the swirling red of Claire’s blood. It was ugly—it was mesmerizing.
“Yes, of course I was scared,” the angel admitted.
Claire frowned. Her mother had been angry, words hurled at her father with whiskey flavored venom; and her mother had been empty, veins emptied out as heroin flooded her system like the flood that washed the earth clean.
But scared?
She never saw her mother scared.
“Then why did you do it?” Claire asked, even though she knew the answer.
The angel looked up, eyes burning with the kind of fury only captured in witness of the darkest parts of hell, and said calmly, “Because he said I didn’t have the guts to do it myself.”
Claire clenched her fists, the blood oozing out and carrying her memories with it.
The bad memories, the ones that made her brain feel like it was on fire.
Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad.
“You stupid bitch,” her father had screamed, knuckles braided into his wife’s hair. “Fucking useless woman. I never should have gotten you knocked up, now I have two parasites sucking the goddamn life out of me.”
A handful of fury flying through the air, followed by a mouthful of agony.
Claire, young and afraid, shaking from behind the arm of the couch.
She shouldn’t move because then she’d be next. She wouldn’t move because her brain would not allow it. She couldn’t move because somehow, deep inside the beating well of her eight year old heart, she knew this was the moment where the world would fall apart. And she had to watch—she had to bear witness to heaven giving way to hell.
Suddenly, in between one breath and the next, a knife was being pressed to the softness of her father’s stomach. Claire watched in awe as her father’s eyes grew wide in fear, his fist going slack besides her mother’s face.
“What do you think you’re doing?” He questioned.
But his voice was too soft—too soft to strike fear like his hands did.
“Let go of me you bastard,” Claire’s mom hissed, her words coming out a little garbled as one side of her face was beginning to swell like a balloon.
Her father obeyed, dropping her mom to the floor with a thud.
Slowly, she stood. Arm extended out, the tip of the knife pointed at her husband like a wedding vow being upheld years later. But then his face hardened, lips drawn back in a snarl.
“Fucking do it,” he spat. “I dare you.”
But she wouldn’t, and Claire knew this as she saw how her mom’s hand shook; as she saw the doubt creeping into her eyes, love deluding her into thinking this was the same man she had fallen for during high school. And Claire knew, however this would end, it would not end with her father’s blood painting the back of her eyelids for the years to come.
She had been right.
Her mother sobbed, and with a tortured sound escaping from her lungs, held the knife to the smoothness of her own throat. Claire couldn’t move, and neither could her father. He watched, hands twitching uselessly at his sides.
“Quit messing around,” he told her, his bottom lip shaking. “You’re not going to fucking kill yourself because of me.”
“Maybe I will,” Claire’s mother muttered, throat bobbing against the silver edge of the knife. “Maybe I’ll make you watch me die, knowing that it’s your fault I’m dead. That it’s your fault we’re all miserable in this hell house. That it’s all your fault, and not mine.”
Her father, tall and strong and a devil squeezed between layers of messy human skin, suddenly looked very afraid—and not for himself.
“You don’t got the guts,” he whispered, voice strained.
A beat of silence, the longest silence in Claire’s life.
Then her father rubbed a hand down his face, turning and spotting Claire cowering a few feet away. The anger melted into sorrow, then melted into something Claire didn’t know how to name—that feeling of despair that came with creating monsters and not knowing how else to love them besides hating them. Claire would grow to know this feeling well, but not yet.
Her father then snatched his beer bottle back from the kitchen table, walking down the hall towards his room as he muttered, mostly to himself, “No one in this house has the guts,” before slamming the door shut behind him.
Claire and her mother remained where they were, as still as stone. Time always seemed to warp in her memories here, as Claire could only remember the terrible before and the terrible after. The terrible after would come in the morning, after her father had gone to work. After Claire had left for school in the morning, but before she’d come home. And before her father could attempt to protect Claire from the scene—as if innocence had ever mattered in their home. And every night after that day, Claire would see her mother’s bloated neck, and eyes like dirty snow bursting from their sockets, behind her own eyelids.
She carried that night with her in her very veins, and for the years that would come after. Even through the beatings her father had originally promised to the ghost of her mother, even when she dropped out of high school to run away from that house and its evil, and even when she too gave up on being better than she was, and turned to drugs and liquor like she had grown up watching her parents do. But now, that night and its grief was finally leaving her system—purging itself from her veins and filling the space between Claire and the angel in the bathtub.
The angel spoke.
“Why, Claire?”
Ice cold eyes pierced sharply in her direction, but Claire just felt warm.
So warm.
She passed a hand through the muddled water, fingers cascading through the dark matter staining the bathwater like a human oil spill. Claire lifted a dirtied hand, holding it between them; this was the cleanest she had felt in a long time, with all the dirt and night outside instead of in. She spared a moment to imagine the warmth of the lord’s light kissing her back, how gentle it must feel. Looking up at the angel, she saw her mother’s worn-down face—a face she had only known for eight years but had somehow haunted her for the remainder of her life.
Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.
Claire smiled at the angel.
“I wanted wings too momma.”
The darkness started to move in, and Claire knew that she should be afraid, but she found that she couldn’t be with the angel sitting beside her. Time began to warp again, and Claire felt her body growing heavy against the cool body of the tub. There was the sensation of wings wrapping around her bare skin, and Claire looked in awe at their white brilliance up close—all the dark matter seeming to have melted into the water around them. She only hoped that her wings would be just as beautiful.
Ray Kruger is is a biracial and transgender writer from St. Louis. He has recently obtained his BA in English from Lindenwood University. You can find more of his poetry and prose in The Raven Review, The Lindenwood Review, and Arrow Rock Literary Journal. You can keep up with what he’s reading and his current publications @reading_with_ray_ on Instagram.
You can find our interview with Ray here.
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