MISSING THINGS
-An Excerpt-
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...A full moon lit the bedroom through the skylight above. Neither could sleep, so Sandy rolled Anna toward him and started kissing her high forehead, her eyes, her down-turned mouth. He tried to kiss her slowly. He could still smell the smoke from the fire that had gone out by itself, leaving a saucer-sized ring in the carpet.
Sandy kissed the large freckle that bled into the center of Anna’s upper lip, and he tried hard to wait. He was never as generous as he wanted to be. When they used to fight, Sandy would realize how silly he sounded, how mean, yet he couldn’t help himself. He’d see himself yelling at Anna and be surprised by the grotesque figure he cut. Early in their courtship, during an argument in which he’d apparently responded the wrong way to some conflict she was having with a professor, Anna told him she couldn’t listen to him any longer. She couldn’t look at him, she’d said. Her willingness to excuse him, to erase him, frightened Sandy, and he agreed to get sensitivity training and counseling for anger management. He was in love. At first, the counseling made him angrier than he’d ever been, but even as he was losing control, Anna complimented him on his progress. Appalled, Sandy hadn’t raised his voice since. The cure took like an alien transplant. His anger stayed mostly inside.
Anna reached beneath the sheets, grabbed, and guided him inside of her. Just as she began breathing heavily, she froze at a noise outside their window.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered.
He had, but he didn’t want to worry her. He stroked her thigh.
“Sandy, I heard someone in the yard.”
“It’s probably a dog,” he said.
She looked over his shoulder toward the window. Leaves rustled in the yard. “No, that’s not a dog,” she said.
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