marduk
by Ash Kemker
George wasn’t dead, but he was supposed to have died. It’s just like, what the fuck man. You shoot yourself in the head, and you don’t even fucking die? That was so silly. He lay on the back wooden porch facing the soldier pines outside. Thought Emily and the kids were gone. His chest was doing the tremble thing like the first time his T.A. Maura came close to him, all shaky, with her face turned down so he could only see the constellation of forehead freckles, and said, “Yes, Dr. Forarsen.” Her sweet high voice was whistling through him, spilling out of his forehead along with his brains. She had the most freckles he’d ever seen on a girl. What had he said for to respond that way? Did he really ask her, “Do you like me?” Was he really that lame? He tried to make his broad, slightly flabby forty-seven-year-old body move. Well, he wasn’t flabby. Was he? Oh God. Maybe, he was flabby and Maura was just being nice this entire time when she fell asleep on his naked, hairy torso. But maybe she was closing her eyes to not look at his flab? He was thinking of this with a hole in his head. This was really—wow. At the end of his appeal last month the police came, took him away from his tenured history professor job, and the cancer in his kidneys wasn’t going to put itself to sleep. Unless he could just be a man and die from the .40 caliber. But. He was shaking uncontrollably. Emily was on the porch with him. She’d taken the kids to dinner. Took a break from packing her stuff to move out soon. Red wolves sounded in the distance, it seemed like. There were some circling around in his home in Eatonton, Georgia. Hiding.
Anyway, with Maura it was different, like all the kings in history turned towards her and said, “Yes.” The freckles all over her face and chest were stars dropped into the wells of the Akkadians. Dance worshipping. Death to bad Marduk. He’d been a bad Marduk, hadn’t he? Let an invader inside the city walls, bestowed not unto his mate and progeny. Let wolves circle the city walls. They’re all gone now, you stupid asshole. All the red wolves hunted to extinction decades ago so you could plunk your house here and go nearsighted and shove your flabby ass into khakis every day. Dancing in the wisteria and pickerel weed twining around the wood deck. Dancing to come take George. George. Someone was calling to him. It was fucking terrible of him to think this, really fucking terrible, but he wished it was Maura and not Emily. He wished for Maura’s muscled legs in his blotty vision, not Emily’s slim tanned ones. Emily was just. She was just so far away from him, even long before Maura. Like she had just dove inside of herself after a decade of marriage without telling him or inviting him along. And when he asked where she’d gone, she just smirked and said, “Fuck you.” Where was the bullet? The blast came through his black beard, tore up his tongue and teeth, scattered the hoplite phalanxes and sent the women running back towards the city walls. I can’t believe we killed all the wolves, and now they’re coming back. They were circling closer to the house, in the gathering greenish dark, punctuated with little white star points.
Ash Kemker is a native Floridian and first year MFA student at the University of New Hampshire. She enjoys Norwegian black metal, obscure history, and existentially terrifying her classmates. Her work has appeared in TERSE Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, Ellipsis Zine, and the audio chapbook series, EAT.