len2

L e n   K u n t z 

Storm Clouds       

     That’s how she thinks of them, laying in a bath, the uneven mounds of ash-gray soap bubbles a place to hide or drown in, a trap door she’s dropped through, her falling having landed here while Gary sits outside making lists of their broken things. Another night looms, pressing in on her like the fragile weight of a vest bomb. The things she’d found in his study were so vile it had been as if she’d discovered dismembered body parts. The photographs and magazine tears were organized by hair color, some dog-eared, other smudged with his fingerprints, fingers that used to trace her spine as he whispered sweetly, “You are my everything,” him a laconic troubadour then, but now nothing more than a criminal, counting the minutes until she goes to bed so he can expand his files—blondes first, brunettes, then red heads—all of it evidence and weaponry just waiting for her courage to bloom, to call him what he is and never was, while her phone sits on the bathroom counter, staring back at her like lit dynamite, the numbers 911 already punched in, taunting her, just waiting to be sent.

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