Bette stood, balanced over the water, hanging forward precariously from the rail on the bridge. It was velvet black all around save for a shaft of moonlight that invited her and pulled her down. It seemed to say, “I guide the tides, I can show you where to enter.” The water rippled slightly below, and she imagined the tinkling sound of distant wind chimes coming from the tiny waves below. The moonlight decorating one side of each small undulation mesmerized her. She drew comfort from the friendship of the moon and its cool hand accompanying her to this place and adorning the water below. 

She took a final moment to appreciate her strong body. She hadn’t realized that her body was strong and that it had will. She had only ever thought of herself as being blown about by circumstance. Her arms were taut, pulled behind her and holding her out at an angle over the water far below her. Nothing was wrong. Everything was right and she felt a power in the starless sky where the moon and the water were the only beings outside of herself, the only bodies that mattered other than her and they were calling her home.

She felt the grip of her hands one last time. She appreciated them for letting her have this moment, this pause, this last view from above. She relaxed her hands. She let go. She said, “I’m coming,” as though she was joining a lover for dinner but had been running a few, unavoidable, minutes late. The cool air rushed up against her face, or rather she thought, she was rushing through the cool air. And then she wasn’t any longer. Her shell was cracked and beaten on the rocks below, but it didn’t matter anymore.

After a piercing scream from a jogger the next morning, gasps, and a collective bursts of angst from other early bird passers-by, someone in the crowd summoned the police and now the people stood in silence as the police did their work far below. The heat of the day, the glare from the burning sun, the burning hot steel rail didn’t compute with the look of cool peace on the face of the woman who let go. No one could bring themselves to approach the edge until they had paused to steel themselves to the reality of the situation.

They all knew, and the officer’s bowed head and body confirmed, that the woman was truly gone, her limbs askew on the ground below in a way that life could not bear, her hair kindly draped wildly about her skull to hide some of her broken beauty from the gazes above.

“Wait,” Bette said, “Wait, I’m supposed to be jumping into water. Why am I splattered on dry ground? I can’t even pretend die right.”

Moonlight shown on the rocks below. The broken woman had always loved rocks and geology.

“OK, this is stupid.”

Bette carried on to the part where she talks to her readers from beyond the grave. She imagined herself in a whisper of a nightgown with no blood on it whatsoever. Cleansed. New. Baptized. 

“I don’t know why I had to die to live. I don’t know why. Something was too broken for me to get past. Something was too broken to get fixed on that side. I couldn’t shake it. I had on blurry glasses. I couldn’t see any way to get them clear. No clarity. No will. No strength. I didn’t know I was going there. I didn’t know what was underneath the water. Wait, the rocks. I knew only that there was a pull, like inescapable gravity pulling me down to it. Coolness, cleansing, waking, water. Or, rocks. All I saw was the water and knew I needed to let go. Why did I have to destroy something to create myself? It doesn’t matter now, I suppose.”

“This is not helping. It needs to be water. Screw it.”

Bette was in bed with the comforter pulled over her head. It had been daylight for three hours but she had been awake for at least five trying to suss out the finer points of a dramatic exit, on several topics. Life, marriage, bed. She hadn’t moved appreciably in any of these directions for a few days. When the light started pouring into the room it had cast a warm glow through the down comforter. She liked being in this cocoon. It was cozy and luminous. She was glad the dark had gone but she wasn’t ready to come out yet. She wondered what it was like to be a baby, remembering the day before its birth and whether each and every one would choose to go right back to a warm protected womb if they could.

“I would,” she thought to herself. It was like death in reverse she thought. But, the thought of being intimately, bodily connected to, and reliant upon her mother again shook that thought from her head quickly. “I’ll just stay here a little longer.”

Today was the day she was going to try to make things right in her world, take a small step or several small steps. She didn’t know quite how, though. The list of wrong things was so long. Exiting a marriage that someone else left first is like sneaking out of the back of a bar after making out drunk with an ugly man in the bathroom. Humiliating. Dirty. Pathetic, she thought.

She was beginning to see blue neon, smell smoke, and hear a jukebox. She was starting to see the outlines of a murder in the back alley. But who? Should she be murdered? Or should she walk out and see her departing spouse, Bruce, and speed down the alley in a big sedan with the headlights off and mow him down. Hit and run style. Or back up over the body again with a satisfying clunk and then smoke a cigarette while waiting for the police to arrive. 

“No. I shall not pretend to die today. Nor murder,” she said.

It was noncommittal. She would consider not pretending. No promises. It was no good to start a day with promises she would not keep. Since Bette was a child, she had soothed herself by imagining complex scenes of murder or suicide in which she was the victim or the perpetrator. The scenes were sometimes prosaic but usually poetic, colorful, bloody, creative, even romantic in the most macabre ways even then. They were particularly troubling coming from a child replete with Barbies pinned to the wall with a Tonka dump truck, or cuddly stuffed bunnies buried in decorated shoeboxes in the garden. Georgia, her mother had taken her to therapy for a year to try to jar the habit out of her and finally tired of paying the therapist.

Bette remembered it like yesterday. Georgia had said to her, “Well, Bette, somebody has to write horror novels. That gory garbage made millions for Bram Stoker and Stephen King. You just go on then. Please don’t kill any actual people or animals. Good? Excellent.”

Pragmatic, Georgia was. And now Bette was in fact a writer of horror books. Two had been published to more than a tepid response. She reminded herself daily not to call them books until they had a binding, but she also had a third close to being finished. And her agent called her last week about the possibility of a horror screenplay, or at least consulting since she was so good at episodic, unconnected and non-narrative gore. It was working. But it did not feel like anything was working today.

The first thing on the list, though by no means the most severe, was Rufus. Bette could hear Rufus right now chewing on something. It was probably one of her shoes. She had purchased hundreds of dollars’ worth of chew toys at the nicest pet lifestyle shops and the bastard still ate her shoes instead. Rufus didn’t damage them. Well, he did. Truly enough they were damaged. But the dog utterly consumed them after. She might find a bit of leather or a buckle. Some color to let her know that she needed to change up her wardrobe to suit the new situation. But worse still was the dog poop. The dog defecated everywhere during the night. The dog shit with no warning and with no request to do so in a more mutually acceptable place. Outside for instance. No, the dog happily shit indoors and often by her bed. Cats were so fastidious with their litter boxes. Rufus did not understand the concept of fastidious. But now, who could blame him? She hadn’t taken him out in three days.

This was one of the reasons, though there were many, why Bette hadn’t come out from under the covers yet. She firmly believed that one should not have to clean up dog excrement as the first order of the day. She believed that dog feces should not be the first smell of the morning. She thought to herself about learning to use the timer on the coffee machine finally. Maybe then, she reasoned, the first scent of the morning would be coffee, not poo. Or at least coffee scented poo. That would be better. With the blanket still firmly tucked all around her to keep out life, she began to wonder at all of the possible synonyms for what the dog had left all over the apartment. If effluvium was an odor, was there an equally lovely word for the object producing the odor? Stop! Stop writing. Live!

So that was three things already. One, get up. Two, clean up dog shit. Three, actually learn to use the coffee maker. No, she thought, that just leads to more. Four, thinking. Five, planning. Things were spinning again. She pulled the covers even more tightly around her again, trying to seal herself in from the troubles and the scents of the new day. But now it was becoming difficult to breathe at all.

The problem was not that Bruce was gone. It was that he had left. He had left her. Worse still, he had left Rufus. And finally, he had left Rufus with her. All kinds of men left their wives. All kinds, and for all sorts of reasons. But what kind of man left his dog? And if he was the sort of man who left a dog, it called into question her whole worldview. It wasn’t that he was trying to leave her something warm to hold onto either. He knew she hated dogs. The dog was an absolute cave-in on her part because she thought, like so many other things, if she just let him win this one, he would be happy. Not so. He was fundamentally and perpetually dissatisfied. And he hadn’t trained the dog either. Dogs needed routines. Even she knew that. Someone had to tell them not relieve themselves on the carpet, which must seem like very nice indoor grass to a dog. Bette had made training his responsibility. She wasn’t going to do it. His dog, his problem. Now it was so very much her problem.

“Ugggh.” Bette let out a small groan and closed her eyes as tightly as she could to block out the warm, comforting light. She didn’t want to see beauty all of a sudden. If her thoughts turned positive she would have to get out of bed and her mind wasn’t ready to make that change yet. And she didn’t feel the ability to sort out visual beauty from the scents of Rufus. It was going to be ruined.

The phone rang again. This was the fifth call in two hours, each followed by the ding that let her know that a small machine was recording the onslaught to come. Ignoring the ring was just ignoring an object. Ignoring the ding and projected voice was ignoring a person. And since she knew that person was her mother, her guilt was starting to play on her. Where was Georgia on her list? Five maybe. Six. Get rid of the land line. Get rid of the answering machine on which only her mother left messages. Georgia used the land line instead of Bette’s cell phone when she didn’t want Bette to avoid her. Her mother said it was nice to get to yell at her, even if she wouldn’t listen sometimes. She said it was like never losing her teenager to college. Her mother said she didn’t want to be trapped in Bette’s cell phone where Bette could choose whether to let her say her piece out loud. Georgia had bought the answering machine for Bette the Christmas after Bette had bought her first cell phone on her own, because on that day she had also thrown out her original answering machine.

Georgia won on the machine. She said Bette had to have a landline so the ambulances would know where to come when she finally almost died of her oft broken heart. And her mother continued leaving messages. She could easily delete hang-ups and political garbage. But, often her mother’s messages were a riot. She never erased those. She deleted the bill collectors, but kept her mom. Every New Year’s Eve she would record the string of messages on her phone and keep the recording in a files marked like “Georgia’s Thoughts 2020” on her cell phone, which was rather funny given that her mother would not leave messages on her cell phone.

She had to do it on New Year’s Eve, usually with a gin and tonic and a smile as she went through her mother’s thoughts and suggestions for the year past. Every single phone record started fresh on New Year’s Day with a call from her mother, just making sure she hadn’t gotten drunk and been murdered and left behind a dumpster somewhere on New Year’s Eve, and reminding her, albeit too late, that she always needed to have a little cash when she went out because a girl had to be able to get herself home. Messages that were rarely funny in real time were always funny as a string on New Year’s Eve. And it seems she got some of her macabre outlook and imaginings from her mother’s ceaseless worries about fires, kidnappings, and alien abductions.

But today’s messages were not funny.

“More guilt. That’s exactly what I need to perfect this morning,”

Bette mumbled and she pulled the cover down to her neck and opened her eyes to stare at the softly lit ceiling. The odor of dog presents assaulted her. She crinkled up her face into a scowl and realized that the face of absolute repugnance actually closed off her nasal passages. It was evolutionary. Brilliant.

“Fine.”

She rolled over and hit the message button and listened to the robot man declare that there were five new messages, which she well knew because she had listened to them live the first times the calls came in and she attempted to ignore them.

“Why have I kept my mother by my bed this entire time? Self-answering question. I needed my mother’s voice but not my actual mother.”

She pondered therapy again momentarily. But it was a lot to pay to sit in an office and daydream about murdering an annoying therapist. Bette laughed realizing that in her life she had imagined murdering or seeing killed almost every person close to her, including herself and certainly Bruce, but she had never ever, not even once, imagined offing Georgia. Come to think of it, Rufus had never been fake-murdered or imaginary-tragic-accidented by Bette either. Interesting coincidence?

Georgia often said she liked having the robot man announce her presence. It was like having a butler that she did not have to pay. Georgia had also declared that she liked leaving messages because it was the only time she could get complete sentences out without being interrupted by her daughter. Georgia liked saying her piece, even if she had to call five times to get it all in. Georgia talked about the importance of the landline answering machine as though it were the pinnacle of human achievement. She even told Bette not to pick up if she missed the ringing because she hated losing her train of thought when she had a good lecture coming.

“I can see you now. Get out of that bed. You have been hiding under the covers for thirty-one years. You are not a bear. You cannot hibernate. Get up and call me, girl. I need to lecture you.”

Next message.

“Bette, I know it hurts. Been there, done that. But you have to get up. You do not have to be happy. You do not have to be okay. But you have to get up and get out. Poor Rufus. He needs exercise.”

“Fuck Rufus,” replied Bette to the air.

Next message.

“Poor pitiful Bette. College educated beauty. Talented and witty. Poor you. The so-and-so left. Good riddance. I never liked him. Get out of bed.”

Bette almost began to cry at that one. She desperately wanted her mother to at least feel sorry for her. She hated it when her mother played this card.

Next message.

“I’m sorry. That was mean. Don’t even think of throwing out the machine. I can see you know ruminating over whether you can hit the trash can in your bathroom from the bedside. What if there’s a fire? I love you.”

Next message.

“Get up or I’ll come over and start banging on the door.”

The robot voice declared, “End of messages.” This was where the machine always made her choose. Delete and rewind. Or, just keep storing her mother’s voice forever. She rolled onto her back.

“Fuck you. I love you, too,” Bette sighed.

Bette took a deep breath, trying not to use her nose. She threw her body upright and threw her feet over the side of the bed. Only a strong, irreversible, throw would get her upright and over the edge. If she slowly moved to an upright position she knew she would just flop back down. She looked down at the t-shirt she was wearing. His. Of course. Pitiful.

“Pitiful!” she yelled at the room. Bette ripped the t-shirt over her head and threw it behind her.

In a second, almost athletic spasm of energy she bounded to standing and took a step away from the edge of the bed. Her right heel squished into a warm, fragrant pile.

“No! No! No!” 

She couldn’t lay back down now. She wouldn’t let the dog sleep on the bed, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to let the dog’s crap into her bed. There she stood in her ugly panties and nothing else. Her face was without expression. She considered a good bout of dissociation. Perhaps she could stand here and work out a therapeutic scene about Bruce’s death.

Later. She couldn’t possibly float off to that comfortable place with excrement on her foot, standing, practically naked.

Bette hopped over to her bathroom on one foot, occasionally dropping the other for support but only the toes, trying diligently to not create a line of number two splats from her bed to the bathroom. She smiled. She hadn’t thought or said number two in at least twenty years. Perhaps it was an omen. Neither she nor her nagging mother, nor kindness towards an animal, nor hunger, nor the knowledge that she had to write to feed herself if she ever wanted to eat again had propelled her toward the shower in the last three days. But dog shit had. She almost smiled at the thought of Rufus and whether he had some agency in his decision to relieve himself right at her bed side. She wiped the mess off her foot with a giant ball of toilet paper and flushed it. She could not tolerate the thought of it melting in the shower with her. As she waited for the water to warm to scalding she thought about Rufus. He appeared in the bathroom doorway as though he had been called. She imagined him speaking.

“Bette, we’re both a little screwed over right now, and I’d happily leave but I can’t work the deadbolt…you’re going to have to get in and shower or we’re both going to die in here and if you die first I am going to eat you. It’s my nature and we are running low on kibble.”

Dog eating the woman’s dead body in desperation. She would have to remember that and scribble down a spare scene for some future manuscript.

Freshly showered, Bette slalomed to the kitchen, avoiding puddles and mounds. She shuddered as she walked, feeling unclean all over again. She went to the kitchen and pondered her next move.

Bruce had always thought of his morning coffee as a ceremony, a process, a drinkable first cup of art for the day. At least that is how he verbalized it. He talked about oxidization and fresh ground beans and fair trade this and that. Bette was highly irritated by the machinery, the veritable car engine and technology on the counter which she realized she had no idea how to use, and no inclination to learn. There were water tanks and tubes and frothers and foamers and tampers. It was beyond stupid and required an engineering degree or a long prior stint as a barista.

His coffee was not a drink, or a piece of art, or a ceremony, but an elaborate control drama where she had to wait, wait until he was ready to perform, to get her caffeine. She wondered if he derived pleasure from buying elaborate technology for the very reason that she would never take the time to study up on how to use it. He was making her incompetent, day by day, using technology as his weapon. He was making himself superior. She had a Mr. Coffee when they moved in together. She liked her Mr. Coffee. There was one switch. He had sent it off to the Salvation Army.

She could work the grinder. There were enough beans for one strong cup, at least. She enjoyed the angry noise of the grinder as it decimated the beans. She dumped the grounds into a cereal bowl and filled it with water and put the bowl in the microwave oven. Not her old hundred dollar microwave. But the eight jillion dollar stainless steel microwave drawer he needed. What absolute twaddle.

Georgia said that only those with a lack of imagination used foul language all the time. Thus bullshit had become twaddle, occasionally. Shit was excrement, now and again. Holy Shit had become Holy Mother of God, which her mother had declared better but still blasphemous, and they had settled on Holy Mother of Pearl. Georgia preferred Well I’ll Be a Monkey’s Uncle, but Bette just couldn’t go there. She failed often, but she tried.

When the microwave beeped, she opened the kitchen junk drawer and pulled out a rubber band. She ripped two paper towels from the holder and doubled them over and folded them into quarters and used the rubber band to attach them to the rim of her biggest mug. She poured the bowl of coffee ever so slowly through the layers of paper towels into a mug. A pile of grounds accumulated on the surface of the paper towels. She smiled. She vowed to get a jar of Sanka today just to spite him. Did they even still sell Sanka?

To her left she looked gratefully at the automatic dog food dispenser he had also purchased. The red light was flashing. It was low on kibble. But that machine had given her the three days she needed. Rufus came into the kitchen and looked at her joyfully with the face he made when anyone opened the hallway table drawer that contained the jangly leash and waste bags. Good Lord, all this, and he was still happy to see her. How? She now realized that Bruce buying an automatic dog feeder should have been a big red flag that he didn’t actually want a dog. He wanted an accessory. Bette wondered if anyone had come up with a dog rental business. Or a dog time-share business. Bruce could have rented a dog three days a week so that he could walk down the sidewalk while everyone commented on how lovely the dog was. He would have worn a prim, high dollar fleece, active wear vest that had never seen a hiking trail over a pressed plaid wool shirt that had never seen foul weather, with his rugged oiled outdoor leather work boots which had never seen work other than looking tough under a desk. There were Bruces everywhere, she thought. He was no doubt standing in line for a triple-fluffy-soy-mocha-matcha-something-or-other right this second, as she was waiting for the last bits of her steeped coffee to strain through her weakening paper towel system.

She heard a faint whistling and looked right through the ceiling to see a baby grand piano plummeting through the bluebird sky straight down to where she imagined Bruce to be standing in line, talking to some bored girl about ethical investment portfolios The glorious cacophony of the keys and complicated strings and shattering wood distracted from what surely lay beneath it…Bruce guts.

She shook it off. The piano was cliché. He often did that, though, spoke ad nauseam about complex, esoteric, high-minded things without even looking to see if his audience was grasping the concept or about to slit their wrists from the captivity and boredom.

Bette dropped the paper towel into the trash. She took a sip of coffee. She kept the mug under her nose and inhaled the scents that he used to go on about…flowery, nutty, chocolatey, bitter, sour. But like the veteran FBI investigator in The Silence of the Lambs looking at a wet, moldering, murder victim at the morgue with big dabs of menthol cream under his nose, Bette smiled and acknowledged to herself that she was merely blocking out the odors of the gifts of Rufus.

Bette thought back to the day before her small, intimate, oh-so-classy, farmhouse wedding which Bruce took a shocking amount of interest in, which she had interpreted stupidly as equality of roles. Georgia had said to her, “If he could rent a wife for dinner parties I think he’d prefer it to actually buying one.” That’s what had Bette thinking about rentable dogs. Bette had been aghast. But as usual her mother had been right, albeit rude, filterless, and with a horrible sense of timing. He had spent far more time researching the photographer than writing vows. And, he had looked beautiful that night. Elegant. Handsome. She had worn a simple gown, with a simple up do, and real flowers in her hair. She had looked…simple. She had to wonder now if he had chosen a simple looking woman so that he would shine, by comparison. Everything about him was relative, and required him to have the marginal advantage. Perhaps he had decided that something he could so easily outshine did not make a very good lifestyle accessory anymore. Just like Rufus. What a monumental prick. Georgia preferred Bette’s use of supercilious tosser when they last discussed suitable terms for Bruce, and Bette didn’t have the heart to tell her what tosser meant. That this conversation took place months before Bruce left was probably an omen.

She took the coffee and the roll of paper towels off the counter and started to consider the cleanup of the messes. Bette looked around and could not decide where to even begin. She heard Rufus chewing on something, and then he whined a bit. She had no idea where he was in the apartment so she called out in a general direction, “You can’t possibly need to go to the bathroom dog because you already went all over the place. I’ll get to you later.”

One pile in she thought better of it. She dropped the roll of paper towels on the floor and walked carefully to her room and pulled on some sweatpants and tennis shoes that had been left on the floor. She went to the hall table and opened the drawer.

Rufus came barreling around the corner holding a man’s shoe in his mouth for once. “Good boy.”

In the hall closet she found one of Bruce’s expensive weatherproof climbing jackets. It was the on the rail with a small fortune of underutilized high quality performance wear. Beneath it were three packed boxes that he said he would come to retrieve. Nothing important, he said. When you are feeling better, he said. She took out the jacket and smelled it, seeking any intimate connection to him. But the four hundred dollar garment had never climbed anything but the few steps in the front of the building. She began to put it on, but stopped. She walked into the living room and tossed it on a spot of urine soaked carpet. She mashed it into the puddle with her sneaker and delighted as she raised her foot to see that the expensive garment was not waterproof after all. She picked up the soaked jacket and hung it back in the closet in the very middle of his things and smushed them all together tightly. He could take all of it to his new place which he was sharing with his fitness coach, Michelle. She was a much more decorative accessory than either Bette or Rufus would ever be.

She turned to Rufus who was actually hopping up and down by the door like a happy kid. When she approached with the leash he sat rigidly, but trembling with joy and allowed her to hook the leash to his collar.

“Let’s go boy.”

She opened the door to a mildly startled Georgia.

“Well look at you, Sunshine.” Georgia said.

Her mother also had on sweatpants and sneakers. She bustled past Bette and set a grocery bag on the hall table. Then she recoiled at the odor. Bette couldn’t help laughing. Then they were both laughing. And Rufus seemed to be laughing with them.

“I finally just decided to come by and make sure you were alive or call the mortuary in favor of your neighbors. You can’t have decomposing bodies around. It is rude and bad for property values. “

Bette grabbed her mother and hugged her tightly. Georgia grabbed back.

“Now I’m ready,” Bette said, and they headed for the elevator.