Marie Cloutier
Darts Night
Editor’s note: This piece contains references to domestic violence and abuse. Please read with care.
They’re home from the bar, Mom and her boyfriend, and the screaming starts suddenly and I’m frozen scanning the spines on my bookshelf and it’s after midnight and I’ve been up doing my homework and this happens every Thursday- they come home drunk and yelling, the thuds the crying the shouts the begging rising up the stars and seeping under my bedroom door, and the pounds, and the thumps, and the fists, the crunch of the plaster and he runs upstairs and down again and I hear the snap-back of the fore-end of the shotgun and inside my head I’m screaming too, red splatters in my brain, red streaks blinding me and my eyes stopped moving and I’m staring at the books but I can’t read them and the light’s still on and I stare at the switch on the wall but my legs are numb I can’t stand up and I pull my knees in tight to my chest with my night-gown arms and try to make myself small, so small, maybe I could disappear but he’s still bellowing and she’s still crying and I can feel every sob hit the wood floor, every tear shatter and break and I rock back and I inch closer to my bed, then there is a hush and then he pounds up the stairs and just outside my door he calls her a bitch so quietly I might be the only person who can hear it, and the door slam rattles the walls and her footsteps follow, slower, shuffling, spent and their bedroom door creaks open and clicks shut and then and only then do my legs straighten and I pad to the switch on the wall and then, the hem of my nightgown brushing my calves, to my bed, where my bare legs swish and swim in the bedclothes and it’s loud, so loud, the sound of the sheets, I’m unable stop kicking- and then it’s over and then one last cry emerges from the dark across the hall.
Marie Cloutier (she/her) is an NYC-based writer publishing flash, poetry and essays about girlhood and womanhood, and complicated loves and losses. Her work has appeared in Five Minute Lit, Bending Genres, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, and elsewhere. She is writing a memoir about disenfranchised grief. Website: www.mariecloutier.com.
