Rough Writing: The Word Slurp

Slurp. Slurp. Slurp. Did he always slurp his soup that way? She couldn't have fallen in love with a man who had no table manners. Could she? Not after growing up in a house with such fastidious parents. But here she was sitting across from someone who had breadcrumbs in his beard and was eating like a convict--one arm laid on the outside of his dish protecting his food and the other shoveling its contents to his mouth only inches away.

"You tricked me," she said. These were the first words either of them had spoken since they sat down to dinner. He was so unused to hearing her voice, he didn't respond, so she said again, "You slob. You tricked me."

When she rose from the table, she knocked her own plate so the last image she had of her marriage was peas rolling this way and that on the worn formica table. She was sorry only that she would not get to the pineapple upside down cake she had made for dessert. In fact, she dumped that cake--now an upside down upside down cake--right onto the kitchen floor before she walked out the door into the cold night air without even grabbing her coat.

And she felt the cold night air on many levels. There was the physical cold she felt as soon as the hot air from her lungs escaped, forming a puff cloud right in front of her face that disappeared as quickly as the stability of her life just had. And there was the emotional cold that grew from her very center out until she felt like a block of ice through and through. The cold felt different to her when she realized she hadn't anywhere to go. Storming out loses all effect when you sneak back in for your purse, keys and phone so she moved to the gate and out into the alley. When she was sure the garage would block his view of her if he cared to look, she stopped to collect her bearings. She was face to face with a metal sign bolted to a utility pole admonishing residents to keep their garbage in the designated bins to guard against the formation of rat warrens.

This was perhaps not the romantic escape she had hoped for--huddling in the winter air next to the trash cans without a coat and no where to go; in the moment, free and scared felt just the same.