If you haven’t read all the previous parts or you don’t remember them well, I urge you to read this novella from the beginning (link here).
My wife’s accusatory glare and weaponized tongue,
Carrying years of racked-up bitterness,
Jabbed, punched, kicked, stabbed.
She flayed me inch by excruciating inch.
You’re a grown man. Stop moping around.
Get off the fucking pity wagon.
Since the beginning, did you have zero intention
Of being fully committed to this marriage?
I gave up law to be a housewife. Am I not enough?
Oh, forgive me for interrupting your endless reveries.
While you’re busy mourning your teenage sweetheart,
I’m here, flesh and blood,
Holding together the family you keep forgetting.
Are you satisfied tormenting me and our child
Because you refuse to let that girl go?
Why do I need to measure up to an idealized teenager?
How is it possible that someone you dated
Fifteen fucking years ago,
Who doesn’t even exist anymore,
Matters more to you than your wife,
The mother of your own fucking kid?
My lovely wife had a lawyer’s soul:
She saw every argument as a chance
To uncover flaws in logic,
To chip away at the opponent’s stance,
To claim the victor’s glory.
As for me, beaten and battered,
I had become a ragdoll
Growing threadbare by the day.
Whenever I anticipated the acidic talk,
I cowered inside my besieged mind,
Clutching at the crumbling battlements,
Lacking the strength to yell at her, or beg her,
To shut the fuck up.
My wife, along with her vindictive glare,
Elbowed her way into my memories of you
To contaminate that sanctuary,
And every time she brought you up,
A pang rippled through my scar tissues,
Echoing, “You’re dead, you’re dead.”
Getting married, sharing an apartment,
Should have provided a traveling companion
With whom to endure this lonesome life.
Instead, I spent my energies erecting walls
To shield my gangrenous heart,
And to muffle any human utterance
Until it became incomprehensible noise.
I felt like I had invested my adulthood
Anticipating a visit to a luminous city,
Saving up and planning meticulously,
Only to arrive at a filthy, ruinous dump
Infested with vermin.
I had surrendered control
Of my meat-and-bones vessel
To someone who didn’t respect me,
Who exploited and mistreated me.
I wished a yawning chasm
Would swallow my wife,
My apartment, this city,
But the mirror of time showed
My stooped figure decades older:
A stammering, browbeaten coward
Just like my father.
My wife was loading the dishwasher
When she casually spewed an attack
That I recognized by its acidic tone,
Even though I had blocked the content.
This time, instead of keeping quiet,
I told her to turn around and listen.
She froze, then straightened up,
Closed the dishwasher with her hip,
And faced me, arms folded,
Her gaze fixed upon me
Like the muzzle of a revolver.
“Each morning since April 27, 1999,
I wake up to the absence of the person
Who made living worthwhile.
You’ve never lost anyone dear,
So you cannot possibly grasp
This grief that has eroded me daily.
You’re frustrated because I have failed
To measure up to your ideal husband,
But I’m the man that remains,
And though I stumble, I’m here,
Doing the best I can with what’s left.
Countless times I’ve wanted to die,
But I chose to keep going for you,
And for our son, who deserves a father.”
“Stop neglecting our family by prioritizing
Your unhealthy fixation with that girl.”
“Do you think I have a choice?”
“Get a fucking therapist. Take antidepressants.”
“Should I erase her, then? Pay to have her scrubbed?”
“You act as if she were the love of your life,
Even though she ruined you.”
Her words had shotgunned my ribcage.
I breathed slowly to quell the shaking rage.
“Maybe love and ruin are interchangeable.
You know, when I agreed to marry you,
I had hoped for a lifelong partner
Who would inspire and encourage me,
Who wouldn’t insist on harassing me
Over the most traumatic event of my life,
Who would provide even a fraction of the joy
That Izar gifted me by simply existing.”
On the opposite side of the kitchen island,
The skin around my wife’s eyes tightened
As her lawyerly mind analyzed my words
For openings, inconsistencies, weaknesses.
Amid the tension, an out-of-place noise:
The creak of our son’s bedroom door.
Drowning out my wife’s bitter tirade,
I imagined his small heart pounding.
Behind that door, a wary creature
Hoped to escape notice.
That evening, I ventured into his bedroom,
Whose walls were a galaxy of space paraphernalia.
My son, reclined against the pillows,
As the glow of the bedside lamp
Illuminated his focused features,
Lost himself in a novel titled “Ender’s Game.”
He tilted his face upward at me as if I were a sun
Failing to warm his frozen planet.
Those glasses magnified deep-set eyes
Whose gaze held mine warily.
“I read that one back in middle school,” I said,
“And I remember enjoying it quite a bit.”
“It’s good,” he said,
Then refocused on the page.
How could I, a ruined man, improve my son’s life?
Instead of training him to carry on into the future,
To survive despite crushing unhappiness,
Perhaps I should abandon him,
Let his resilient mother forge ahead
Without the burden of my misery.
Izar, if this child had belonged to us,
How would you have nurtured him?
You, the sun I revolved around.
You, who had taught me what it meant
To make the best of a crumbling world.
My son and I rode on leg-powered bikes
Past the ruins of Roman furnaces.
Our pedals and chains clicked rhythmically.
On the muddy path beneath our tires,
Gravel crunched and stray twigs snapped.
Puddles from recent rainfall mirrored
The dove-gray cloud cover
And arching, naked branches.
A blanket of fallen leaves blurred
The boundaries of the unpaved path
Flanked on our left by an ancient wall:
A mosaic of weathered, moss-daubed stones.
The mist that hung in the air cooled my lungs.
We reached a fork in the trail
Where a slope would force us to dismount
And push our mountain bikes uphill
While seeking purchase on exposed stones.
“Let’s head up there,” I said.
My son, as he readjusted his helmet,
Shot me a skeptical look.
“Where does it lead?”
I got off my bike.
“I don’t know.”
A meandering dirt path, worn by footsteps
But now reclaimed by nature,
Opened to a clearing of greens and browns
Where square, one-story buildings stood,
Their once-white walls aged, stained,
And half-conquered by creeping ivy.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be here,” my son said.
I stopped and listened to the chirping birds,
To the distant creaking of branches,
But no one had claimed these ruins.
“Let’s explore,” I said.
We were rolling our bikes through the garden
Of a family gone for decades.
An anonymous hand had gathered stones
To form the sinuous banks of a stream.
Water rippled, reflecting dapples of sunlight.
Wide-leafed plants, unique in these woods,
Still blossomed white, bell-like flowers.
Beside the stream, on a filthy, pitted wall,
An intact grill guarded a window opening
That gaped like a hollow eye.
My son followed cautiously.
“How old do you think this place is?”
“It belongs to the Roman era.”
“C’mon, dad. Romans lived, like,
A thousand years ago.”
“More like two thousand.”
“Mom would scold us if she saw us
Wandering around abandoned places.”
“No doubt. But she doesn’t have to know.”
“Imagine if we owned this secret space,
And transformed it into a hideout.”
“These days? They would take it from us.”
“What if zombies attacked now?”
“We should have brought baseball bats.”
“I bet if I had a machine gun,
I’d blast every last one of them.”
“Good luck convincing mom to buy that.”
We let the bikes fall into a patch of tall grass,
Then we entered the roofless, derelict house.
Its floor was carpeted with dried leaves
That crackled under our sneakers.
Against the inner walls and their peeling paint,
Someone had arranged piles of chipped bricks,
Remnants of moss-cloaked furniture,
Rusted mattress springs.
Logs lay scattered, their bark mottled.
Weeds had sprung up all around,
Thriving amid the detritus.
I inhaled the scent of moist soil and tetanus.
At the end of the garden stood a woodshed
Stacked with logs shrouded in grimy cobwebs
Like antediluvian bones in a catacomb.
Decades ago, the owner picked these logs,
Hand-chopped them, and stored them as fuel
For fires that would never come.
Author’s note: the songs for today are “Swan Dive” by Waxahatchee, and “Cosmic Love” by Florence + the Machine.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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