Median
by Albert McManus 

Stephen glared out the window of the car as it rushed down the interstate. He watched the pine trees become dark green blurs then he glanced at the painted lines on the road stretching for what seemed like infinity, moving forwards or backwards. He couldn’t tell which way. The lines seemed to be one endless stream of bleak white paint that faded a little more every day. After acknowledging this, he turned his attention back to his wife in the driver’s seat. Her brown hair looked thin and sickly, her skin was pale. It almost looked grey from the dull overcast hue thrown down from the sky. She looked at him with her piercing blue-grey eyes and frowned at him. He couldn’t think of anything to say, he was speechless.

“I fucking hate you,” Jessica spat bitterly.

“I…I fucked up. I’m sorry,” Stephen mumbled sheepishly.

“You’ll pay for it,” her icy voice croaked.

Stephen felt wretched. He felt like a maggot, squirming his way into the piece of rotting flesh he now called life. He deserved to be stepped on, crushed into oblivion and he knew it. These feelings of guilt chained themselves to his heart, or what was left of it. He stewed in regret and shame for a moment that felt like an eternity.

Stephen’s mind reeled back to earlier that evening, where his life collapsed and shattered like a house of glass cards. He was sitting in his favorite diner, sipping whiskey with diet cola and nibbling at an overpriced rack of ribs slathered in smoky barbeque sauce. His mind wandered from one empty daydream to another, stumbling aimlessly like a vagabond with no place to rest his tired heavy head. Half way through his fourth drink his mistress sat down in the chair front of him. She was eager to ease his troubled mind; more eager than the seven-hundred dollar hooker he bought out the night before. He sat up in his chair and gazed in at her body, his eyes were gleaming with lust. His thirty year old body was frail and weaker than it should have been, but she didn’t seem to mind. She gazed into his eyes, peering into his dark vacant soul. Her smoky brown eyes uncoiled something inside him. Something he thought he lost forever, but he found it once again. He found something he could only call hope. She gave him a better life, one that was lively and passionate; or at least that’s what he thought. She twirled her long blonde hair with her blood red fingernails as she winked at him. Stephen pulled out a black leather checkbook and a sleek silver pen. Just after he finished writing the check for his lunch he wrote one for her, Ashley stood and adjusted the two masses of  silicone that were bulging out of her low cut shirt.

“I’m ready when you are.” She whispered as she playfully grabbed his collar with one hand and led him out the restaurant. His checkbook was on the table one moment and in her pocket the next. Stephen didn’t even see her take it; she just looked at him and smiled as they made their way to his car. They were barely in the back seat of his plush luxury car before her bra came off. Stephen had just reached for breasts as he heard his wife screaming behind him.

“You fucking pig, how could you? You piece of worthless shit,” she yelled.

Stephen was in shock, he felt a cold sinking feeling rattle its way deep into his core. His cheeks burned with shame and guilt. Stephen tried to open his mouth and speak, but he couldn’t find the right words, if there were any. Ashley didn’t look Jessica in the eyes; she just cast her gaze downward at the black leather interior of the car. 

“Well, bitch, get the hell outta my goddamn car,” Jessica spat venomously.

Ashley put her top back on and slithered out of the car, being careful not to look at or brush against Jessica. Ashley traipsed over to her car, smothering a devilish smirk with her hand as she drove out of the parking lot.

Jessica stared at Stephen, her eyes were gushing over with tears from the fury and pain. He thought for a moment that she might drown herself in the tears if she cried much longer. Then something inside her shifted. Her face became hardened by the pain. She looked ghastly, drained of all life and color. It was as though a colony of leeches had been attached to her hollow soul and sucked away any life she had left.

“Listen, Jessica baby I’m so sorry,” Stephen cried out, hoping those were the magic words.

He was digging his grave deeper with every syllable. Jessica stared at him with her cold dead eyes as she crawled into the driver’s seat of the car and peeled out of the parking lot, burning black tire tracks into the pavement. She began to yell over the sound of the squealing tires.

"You heartless bastard. You left your fucking phone on the kitchen counter. I took a cab here to come see your sorry ass when that whore you were about to fuck texted your goddamned cellphone. The bitch said she would be waiting here, and then she sent a picture of her tits. I hoped she had just had the wrong number, but a part of me knew better. All you ever did was lie to me. Honesty never was and hope ran away from me five years ago after my AIDS test came back positive. At first I thought it was from a bad needle, now I see it was just your prick.” Her voice was tense and cold like a corpse with rigor mortis.

It was all true, it may have been the only thing in his life that was.

Stephen grabbed his thoughts and began to drag them back into the present. He snapped back into reality when he felt the car lurch forward and heard the engine whine under the stress.

“Jessie, what are you doing?“ Stephen asked anxiously.

The speedometer was edging towards the 130 mile per hour mark.

“Something I should have done a long time ago,” she said as she crashed the car into a concrete median in the center of the interstate.