44 Chapters About 4 Men - BB Easton Page 0,80

Leathery. Spent. His fair skin, damaged from countless hours working outdoors and riding a motorcycle, was already set into deep wrinkles, exacerbated by a lifetime of scowling. His baby-fine almost transparent blond hair—grown out and slicked back, biker-style—lay thin and limp atop his head. Not much different from when it had been shaved, it was still just a colorless frame around a colorless face.

Without a whisper of pigment in his eyebrows, eyelashes, or sideburns, Knight’s leveling arctic-blue eyes with their contrasting black pupils used to provide the only point of reference on his otherwise pallid face. Without them, his appearance was that of a man wearing an unfinished flaccid, flesh-toned rubber mask. As my brain desperately searched and scanned his pale face for that familiar bite of blue, repeatedly coming up lacking, images from the final scenes of The Terminator began to infiltrate my consciousness.

After being chased and generally terrorized by the T-800 for at least ninety minutes of screen time, Sarah Connor finally manages to lure the evil cyborg into a hydraulic press in an abandoned factory. Exhausted, injured, and suffering from shock, Sarah watches in disbelief as machine crushes machine. Just when she thinks the steely predator is going to get up again and continue its pursuit, like it has a dozen times already, the piercing red orb of light burning from behind the T-800’s metallic eye socket slowly fades to black. Sarah can only stare back in disbelief at the motionless exoskeleton of that digital demon, gasping for breath and grasping to accept the fact that she is finally safe.

As I gazed into that casket, I knew exactly how Sarah Connor felt. Knight had been my own personal Terminator—obsessed, unrelenting, literally programmed to kill. To see him lying there, motionless, the flame-blue light in his eyes blinked out for good, was surreal.

And like Sarah, I was also carrying a very special little boy in my belly.

That little boy is now four years old, and he is all me. All mine. He’s a lover, a rebel, an artist, and a very old soul. He’s the kind of man I wish the world had more of, and I’m pretty sure the universe sent him here to keep me from killing my husband.

Actual Poem I Wrote for Ken on Our Eighth Wedding Anniversary

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, ASSHOLE

Eight years of marriage and you still don’t compliment me

Or say anything particularly romantic

Or appear to have any emotions at all.

But you gave me the love of a little boy who tells me I’m beautiful every day,

That I’m the “best woman in the whole world,”

Who won’t go to sleep until he’s hugged and kissed me—

Properly.

A little boy who looks an awful lot

Like you,

So much so that when his little Ken face tells me he loves me, I know he’s speaking for you

Both.

What a Difference a Year Makes

FOR KEN

ON OUR NINTH ANNIVERSARY

You make me want to dance

Like a girl on a pole.

But instead, I watch other people dancing

Gracefully inside the black frame of our TV,

And I shove my lingerie a little deeper in the drawer.

You make me want to paint, create,

But all I’ve created are some babies,

Which took a lot of time.

And take a lot of time

And leave me with just enough time

To think.

So, I tap out my thoughts,

One-handed in the dark,

Our baby asnooze in my arms,

Because words are all I can produce these days—

Besides people

And milk.

But know that, if given the choice

Between pas de deuxs and oil pastels

Or caring for cherubs

Who look like you and act like me,

Who love to dance and draw on floors,

I’d watch them paint and pirouette instead.

Sex on the Beach

May 27

Dear Journal,

I guess Ken appreciated that I finally wrote him a poem without the word asshole in it because he surprised me on our anniversary with an invitation to have sex…with him…on the beach!

How did I not know that nine years was the sex-on-the-beach year?? I thought nine years was the wood anniversary! Or maybe it still is…

Hey-oh!

My birthday, Ken’s birthday, and our anniversary all fall in the same week, single-handedly disproving the entire zodiac theory. (There is no fucking way that Ken and I are the same astrological sign. We’re barely the same species.) So every year we just take that week off and go on vacation. This particular year we (I) decided to rent a little house on an island near Charleston. Only, who the fuck wants to spend a week at the beach with two little kids? So, we invited Ken’s parents to come along and help out (keep