Rough Beast
by Rafe Brox
She said she was afraid she had cancer.
In the space between her fear and my faint reassurance ("You'll be fine"), so flimsy that you could hear the lie and the parentheses, an entire future took place; a betrayal of her ongoing life, a fraction of a second where the future wasn't just better, but perfect without her, like the last temptation of Christ.
The cat killed, the family distant and uncertain, and an old flame come to warm the bed.
The shape of hubris welled up in my jaw, choking like a granite bolus, threatening to spill the poison thoughts from split skin and fissures in my skull.
"You'll be fine."
She doesn't know what a monster sleeps next to her some nights.