Fated

New to the neighbourhood, he'd heard that the grocery store down the street had the freshest produce in town, so that's where he went to pick up the Romaine lettuce and three-color cole slaw. Somehow he'd stumbled on a bachelor menu item combining egg thins, lettuce and cole slaw and a overly-generous yellow mustard and onion dressing, and he'd been eating that nights since the weather had turned hot. In the produce section, as he was browsing through the stack of lettuce, the young woman he'd met the day before recognized him and offered that he take care and wash the lettuce thoroughly. Salmonella, she said. He'd met her by chance. Her sheepdog had slipped its collar and got loose at the park. Just like in a cheap romance novel, he'd rescued the dog and returned it safely to her, for which she said that she would be eternally grateful. That was just too fine a piece of good luck for someone like him to stumble into, so he wrote it off as a passing fancy and not a serendipitous happening.

That was two weeks ago, and my instincts had been right, but other drives were at play and they assumed the position of prominence in my affairs. I saw her a third time at the corner bistro, and we'd shared a coffee, and that's when she invited me to a party she was having for a friend at her place. She was in the condo towers across the street, with a near panoramic view of Lake Michigan. Naturally, by now it had become natural, I accepted and from there everything snowballed. I moved in with her, because my place was a dump and I was renting month-by-month. She behaved as if she were the condo owner, and I had no reason or interest in questioning, so we moved beyond that very quickly.

It was a splendid summer and the fall was even more magnificent, but by December there was a chill in the air. His work became very stressful leading up to Christmas, and she grew increasingly disagreeable with his work-life imbalance. The day she yelled at him in the kitchen for drinking out of the orange juice carton, a switch tripped and their connectivity never quite re-stabilized. They started sleeping apart. Every day it seemed, he'd hear her shouting at the dog or at the phone after she'd hung up, and he retreated, not being confrontational. He was worse, much worse—he was passive aggressive in the extreme. He managed to set her off as if that was his part and he played it well. His unflattering comments about her habits or unfavourable views about her friends were more than just unguarded. They were downright provocative as even he acknowledged when replaying episodes in his mind.

Long story short, one day I choked her to death on the balcony overlooking a glorious sunrise over the lake. She was screaming at the dog again and then me, and the sound of that shrieking banshee voice filled the clear, cold air several floors above and below and even across the street as the traffic was still light that early. I put my hand to her mouth, she pushed away, and then I grabbed her skinny neck—I'd never noticed how beautiful and slender her neck was—and closed my grip. Just enough to silence the screeching harpy, but it was never quite enough, so I squeezed harder and tighter, looking around to see if I was being watched. The dog was watching. It was paralyzed with fear. But no one else caught my eye. And then it was over. My hold relaxed, and she slumped to the frosty balcony floor. The dog moaned, tucked its tail and ran away. The look he gave me when before he turned to run slapped me wide awake to what I'd done. That look never leaves me when the lights are turned out. It was as if she had been looking at me through her dog's eyes.

His life ended that day—not literally. But in every way that seemed to matter, he was dead. Once again he considered that if only he had been consistently unlucky, things might have turned out differently.