Photo by Matthew Smith on Unsplash
John Smith was a masculine man. After midnight, just before his sixty-sixth birthday, he texted his sister, with whom he had not spoken for years, that he was gone. In a clean and empty hotel room in the desert, holding a tumbler of dark whiskey in one hand and a gray Glock in the other, he imagined himself brave as Ethan Edwards, but he didn’t wonder about his adult sons who he had not seen since they were teens. He didn’t think of his ex-wife, how beautiful her white blond hair had looked against her chiffon dress on their wedding day, how the Southwest spring air was sweet with the scent of strawberries on their anniversary every year, how she stayed smiling through several abandoned jobs and one lost house, how she never stopped until the day she told him she was done. He couldn’t remember the person he had to pretend to be because he was a boy left alone. He wouldn’t let himself remember his alcoholic ex-marine father, the one good memory from childhood he once had, of jumping in the ocean while the sound of families playing at the Santa Monica Pier was like a distant wind, when he almost learned how to swim.
Natalie Marino is a poet, writer and physician. Her work appears in Gigantic Sequins, JMWW, Pleiades, Rust + Moth, Salt Hill, South Florida Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She lives in California. You can find her online at nataliemarino.com or on Instagram @natalie_marino.
