Things in Donnie's life were getting ugly, and showing signs of a serious meltdown.
All the signs and omens were there to see, had been for a while, but he kept ignoring them, looking the other way.
There had been changes in the strange mental air he moved through, and he was just smart enough to know what was coming wasn't going to be fun. He kept hoping that his coming shitstorm wasn't as big as it felt from where he was sitting.
The unraveling of his home life started with little things that made him feel helpless, like not knowing where Darlene was, or wondering why she looked so sheepish when she rolled in hours late, and fell right into bed without talking much.
She'd been getting more distant from him for a while. Not so much in the way she showed affection, that stayed fairly constant, but in the way she kept dreaming up new things to run off and do without him.
She had became totally detactched from almost everything involving the plans they had made together, and the way she got that distant look in her eyes, like she was staring off at something further away than the eye could possibly focus, and the long frozen silences that had replaced her usual chatter.
Not that the chatter stopped completely, it did keep up, but only when she was on the phone, and it stopped dead whenever Donnie walked in to the room.
It had became obvious that she had been moving on, showing only a strange sort of lingering affection and a desire not to feel like a total asshole for being the one to detach first.
When the wheels started coming off, they did it with surprising speed, and an odd, and totally bland and unexpected way. Like most things, it was not very well thought out, and happened in the way a frog jumps out of a pot of hot water right before it croaks.
In the space of about two weeks, it went from being a comfortably numb life of drinking and desultory and unfulfilling sex into a full blown mind fuck of life changing events.
That was right about the time he found the first of the bones in the backyard compost heap, and when he noticed that she hadn't gone out in the daylight for months.
I started a short novel by accident last year, some of which was written by my pal Pat Webster. I'm going to post it here in a slightly re-written way, partly because I'm too damn lazy to write much these days, and partly because I don't suck as much as a writer. Hope you enjoy it, it'll be mixed in with other posts.
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