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No Way Back From the Lies.

They strangled out the truth.

By Jennifer Cervantes Published 2 years ago 6 min read
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No Way Back From the Lies.
Photo by Taras Chernus on Unsplash

The clock said 8:05pm. She hadn’t looked, at least not in the last minute, but she knew. She had been checking the time obsessively for the past two hours. She looked down at the phone on the bed and nudged it with her pinkie. She left her hand there resting against it. The hard case was warming under her touch. The longer her finger laid against it the more it called to her. She told herself she didn’t need to look. She didn’t want to look. But then she swiftly picked up the phone and unlocked it in one fluid motion. A swipe and tap later, she was staring at his face in that little circle with the pin to his location. He was still there. Some building in the valley she didn’t know. Except there was the little bed symbol in red, screaming to her it was a hotel. She tossed the phone back on the bed and sighed. He was still there. She wondered what he was doing. What the woman must have looked like. What they were drinking. Then she shook her head trying to shake off the feeling of desperation. She didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter. At least that’s what she told herself.

That was the same line that had been playing on repeat the past week. Well, five days to be exact. Five days since she sat on the bench outside the courtroom waiting. Five days since she heard the clerk say, “The judge signed off. It’s all done.” Seven words. In seven words her marriage was over. The life she had hoped for was finished. The man she loved was walking away.

She threw her legs over the side of the bed and let them swing back and forth. Then she pulled them back onto the bed and curled her arms around her knees. She let her chin rest on her right knee. Tears began to drip onto her jeans. She didn’t bother wiping them away. Instead, she just watched the drops turn from single dots to larger splotches. Two minutes later her legs swung off the edge of the bed and she let her toes hit the carpet. Her socks stuck along the fibers of the rug, but once she hit the hallway they slid across the wood-like vinyl. She swung open the refrigerator door and stared at the mostly bare shelves. Then she opened the freezer even though she knew there wasn’t anything there. She hadn’t been to the store. She opened the cupboards, sighed, and let her feet slide along the vinyl as she walked back to her room. In another 20 minutes or so she would do it all over again. She’d already been to the fridge three times. Not once did she get anything to eat.

All the lights were off in the apartment except the one small light in her room. It made the space around the bed glow yellow. Near the door it cast shadows of boxes she had rummaged through earlier in the day trying to find a hairbrush. She didn’t worry about running into anything as she made her way back to the room through the dark spaces. She knew exactly where all three pieces of furniture were. One small couch bought second-hand from online, one worn chair she brought with her, one table she got from a woman who had no use for it anymore. That was it.

When she fell onto the bed her phone bounced slightly calling to her. She ignored it and picked up a book off her rickety wooden nightstand. She flipped it open and began to read. Her eyes travelled over the words and then over sentences, but when a teardrop fell to the page and spread across the print, she gave up pretending she had actually remembered a single thing she had read. She let the book close and then dropped it to the floor.

Her mind wandered back to that morning in May. It was 4:00am when he woke her up. Her eyes were barely open. Her mind was still lost in some dream. But when she turned toward him she saw he had her phone in his hand. She wasn’t fully conscience, but she knew what it meant. He had been up all night. Again. Pouring through the phone. “You’re a liar,” he said, “How are we going to handle this?” She wasn’t sure what “this” was. But she knew it wasn’t good. She looked at him and then let her eyes fall to the bed. “I’ll leave I guess.”

“So leave now,” he responded. She sat up and faced him. “Right now,” she said her voice pleading, “It’s four in the morning.” His face hardened and she knew he wasn’t changing his mind. So at 4:00 in the morning she packed her car with everything she owned. It wasn’t much. Her life packed into a car. And she drove away.

She thought about those four words often. “I’ll leave I guess,” A string of words that changed her life forever. Four stupid words spoken out of a half-conscious stupor that confirmed to him what he thought he knew and what she knew wasn’t true. She hadn’t cheated. But it didn’t matter. The lies she’d told tainted any words that came from her mouth. Even when the things he thought were crazy or ludicrous, she had no ground to stand on.

Her eyes traced the edges of the blanket on the bed. She strained to remember all the details of May. She wanted to remember why she’d become so hopeless. She needed to remember why she had conceded and given in so quickly that morning. She knew he wasn’t right. Why did she leave? She couldn’t remember. Was it her own lies that made her feel so defeated or the false accusations? They tangled in her brain until she couldn't pull them apart.

She rolled onto her side and pulled her legs into her chest tightly. She had ruined everything. And now he was in some hotel with a woman she didn’t know starting over. And she was laying in a pile of blankets hoping there was some way to stop time and go back. She pulled the blanket up over her head and let the tears pour out onto the pillow. No dots or splotches. Streams of water, like overflowing rivers, running onto the cotton. Her chest heaving. Her breath struggling and shallow. Her thoughts on him. She would give anything to go back five days, to take back those four words, to show him he wasn’t right. But there was nothing to give that would change the seven words the clerk spoke so matter-of-factly. “The judge signed off. It’s all done.”

Short Story
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About the Creator

Jennifer Cervantes

I am a fun 44 year old teacher librarian in Washington state. I love words! And stories that people can relate to! Especially children…

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