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smashed - hollin locke.
i tilt my head, there is something about being here nowadays that makes my skin itch, as if it should come away from me in parched, dry sheets, a snake shedding its layers. this used to be mine, and now it mocks me. i always did think it stuck out too far, too high, almost too regal of a skeleton for the disease it housed. All I see when I look at this f***in’ building, is failure. failure of a marriage, failure of my body or failure of the chance to do things over.
respected though he was, or feared, choose how you spin it, i still know him for what he was, is, what he was and had been to me all those years. how different things were, when they met, the Locke siblings were no more than blithering idiots trying to make a go of it after their maw and paw snuffed it.
i hate comin’ here, he’s so different nowadays, it's clinical, friendly but not friends. we became so poisonous to one another, i could sit here and play the victim, course i could, but it wouldn’t be honest. i ain’t the kinda girl to sink into the wall flowers and act small and unassuming. i could, and do hold my own.
he could be a f***in’ bastard, towards the end I knew he wanted out, but he just wouldn’t say it, and part of me wanted to prolong the inevitable, cling to the power i had left. already balls deep in her. fillin’ her belly with the baby I wanted. i won’t say it’s karma one hasn’t stuck, but ya know.
i f***in’ hated her then, because i thought she’d won. miss fuckin’ sunshine. she had him, and she’d won, and i may as well have been screaming into the void cause every f***er just accepted it. we had been married since we were nineteen, all those years just gone.
i prayed for the first time in my life, but there ain’t no-one up there that gives half a damn, and i also mildly considered the smooth metal of a shot gun bringing me peace. god wasn’t listenin’, and I figure that he don’t listen to folk like us. people that sink into the dirt and swim in it like dogs, writhing in their ruin. in fact, the only one of us that probably has any kinda ongoing conversation with the big man upstairs and maintains any kinda kinship is cilly, orla’s crackpot lad. too teeming with guilt to accept this cess pool for what it is.
i don’t hate her now, cause i see the life she leads, and the loss she wears on her gullet like a boulder. blair shea is the victim i didn’t ever want to be. i often imagined what it would be like to crawl up inside her, feel the soft pink wetness of her innards and just get him to look at me the way he sees blair, just once.
instead all i see is his face, twisted and cocky, cigarette ever perched at the end of yellowed fingers. i nipped the end of one off one, lobbing a vase as hard as i could. i just wanted to hurt him. it was vapid rage followed immediately with blind regret, philip didn’t even flinch, just accepted the onslaught with the same stony resolve he always had, peered at his finger as droplets of vermillion sank into the thick carpet between his toes. “feel f***in’ big now do ye hollin?” he had muttered, talking around the bloodied tab end that now stuck to his bottom lip, all that and his cig was still intact. he hadn’t so much as brushed past me. violent though he was, to his credit, i was the banshee he had tried to tame all these years. a f***in’ toddler stampin’ her feet as i’d always done. fat lotta good it did me. when that man was done, he was done, just wouldn’t say it if it killed him. instead, he preferred to get on his soapbox after the fact.
he only ever turned on me once, rattling my skull into the closet door until my ears rang. i cant really remember why, only that i’d poked and prodded too much, but as soon as he’d grabbed me, his fingers melted to a quiver and he let go. too ashamed to continue the conversation he had walked out. shouldn’t have followed him and yet, i found myself nose to nose, bent over his desk as he bowed his head, pupils sinking into the words he couldn’t absorb on the papers in front of him, a guilty dog.
quietly, and all too calmly, he dropped a heavy palm on top of mine, the hot metal of his wedding band resting there as he removed himself said all it needed to.
i’d been a cunt, we had been.
now it was all gone and he was different somehow, he glowed. we had settled over the years, i didn’t hate any of them. turned out once you’d been married that long, you ceased to have an opinion at all.
years of toil, reduced to the unofficial alimony check he still delivered every month. loyal as a labrador that man, to a fault. it’s not the money, i can do without it. but we always have a coffee, and manage to laugh at the idiocy in our marriage, and i know there’s a heart beatin’ in that tin chest.
we’re different folks when we’re with the person we’re meant to be with.
i do wonder though, what he’d do, if he knew most nights i still slept under this roof. i do wonder how he’d alter if he knew his brother was the one keepin’ me warm at night nowadays. that was difference i suppose, one of them would lay down and die for the other, dermot locke, however, only loves dermot.
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