True Love

‘Why would I want to kill her? Why would I want to hurt someone I love so much?’

‘Because you know it can’t last forever. Things are going to go bad. She’ll get ill; she’ll become old and ugly; she’ll find someone else and leave you shattered and broken.’

I’m thinking back to last night, sitting at the kitchen table waiting for Claire to come home, wondering where she was, with who she might be.

‘If you kill her, the present will be suspended in time. Things won’t have to degrade, she won’t have to hurt you.’

My mouth splits in an ironic smile. Despite the ridiculousness of his argument it does hold a twisted logic. Someone more gullible might lend it some credence; start to see some persuasiveness in such crazy ramblings. Claire, for example, has always been one that is easily led, listening to people with a trusting belief. But I’m more cynical than her and look at things with a cold, logical reasoning. I dispel the old man’s argument unequivocally.

‘You’re crazy,’ I tell him, standing up to leave. I no longer wish to sit with the man I had supposed to be so genial, but whom I now see only as a sick, twisted lunatic.

As I go, he says to me:

‘If you truly love her, you will kill her.’

I ignore him and leave the bar quickly without looking back.

I walk home in a daze, my mind filled with the old man’s poisoned assertions. They have struck me hard, maybe because with the growing fear that my wife is seeing someone else, they don’t seem so unreasonable.

I get home and go through to the kitchen where I find Claire sitting at the table. She stands as I walk in and turns towards me with wide, worried eyes.

‘Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘I just went for a few drinks after work,’ I tell her, my mind still heavy with an old man’s twisted evil.

‘We need to talk,’ she says, wide eyes now looking slightly fearful. I sit at the kitchen table to await what she has to say.

I’m not expecting the words that leave her lips.

‘I went to that American bar after work last night,’ she says, and I start to feel fear slowly creeping through me. ‘I got talking to an old man there. He made me think about a few things.’

She takes an object from the draw below the microwave and holds it in both hands before her.

‘I love you so much,’ she says.

And comes at me with the knife.