He picked up a coffee-stained mug, left over from the garage sale his wife held the weekend before she less than politely asked him to leave the house they had shared for fifteen blurry years. It fit his hand well, familiar, like a long lost comfort from better days, when he believed his future still held many unlimited possibilities, unseen by him but waiting there nonetheless. The rest of the contents of the cardboard boxes, haphazardly stuffed full, shouted a reminder that this was his life now, crap shoved into a box by an angry woman who would like nothing better than to never have to see him or his shit again. The only thing missing were the boxes labeled Fucking- Lazy-Ass- Waste of Skin, one of the most loving nicknames she called him when particularly angry and Genitals of the Man Who Ruined My Life. The latter was more of a hormone-spiked dream on her part but the bitch did have a way with words, he surmised, as he drank yesterday’s coffee, reheated in a small microwave purchased recently at the Salvation Army. It tasted just fine in that mug despite the floating cloudy haze.

“Not a cloud in the sky! I can finally see for miles and miles now,” he shouted, a defiant voice echoing in the large garage that once held two cars, both of which he still owed on but was currently only in possession of one.

He wished his soon-to-be-ex no ill will really, because she had served her main purpose by popping out two, rowdy sons who caused all kinds of hell around the house for her. Despite the fact that they would not be living with him, he still knew that his influence was in them and that made him smile. Their hasty marriage, a decision that had been agreed to after a bar bet between him and his buddies, traveled its destined path, ending up exactly where he imagined it would an hour after saying “I do.” It amazed him that he stayed put so long but there was no doubt that the years had finally tripped him up, slowing his thoughts down to a sad, medicated crawl. The other options: the younger women he ran into at work, the gym and his usual bar, no longer looked at him the same way and laughed when he tried his best to impress. Pity wasn’t what he was looking for, so he settled into his carnival-prize marriage and the depression that came along with his not-so-well-thought out decision helped him cope, oddly.

The new, fresh-smelling solitude all around allowed his mind to float to a place he hadn’t been brave enough to go in ages, to a girl he knew twenty years ago. This girl, the only one who had given him everything, her body, mind and complicated heart, all in exchange for nothing from him, he had thought. He acknowledged, up front, that he was lonely and in need of someone to listen and be “available” when he needed comfort and this worked for the first few months but then she messed things up by telling him she loved him. His immediate, negative response wasn’t necessarily meant to be received as a blunt force trauma but the obvious pain, twisted across her face, clearly showed that this was not at all what she expected to hear and when she timidly whispered, “Just kidding,” he knew what he had done. This knowledge tapped his conscience on the shoulder many times afterwards but he brushed each attempt away, moving forward into the more familiar territory of sweet denial. He made her no promises, saying from the beginning that while he would never tell her he loved her he would be more than willing to have a good time with her. It had seemed like a fair exchange to him.

They met when she was seventeen, fresh from experiencing high school crushes and second-base advances but still ignorant enough about how the world really operated to believe him when he said he was a man of honor. She seemed okay with the idea of letting him touch what no one else had, eager almost, to shed the shiny plastic wrap that encased that brand new, sweet wet pinkness, the thought of which excited him nearly blind, dulling his usually sharp senses.

After being in the Army, on the minimum three-year stint and quick placement in an MP unit, he had been ready for a new, pure heart and any willing ear eager to listen to the words he felt compelled to speak. In the Army, no one cared about his thoughts on the state of the world and of living an uncomplicated life, free of the trappings of authority and regulations. He had “Yes Sired” his way to a desired assignment in Germany where he drank too much and made a game out of pity fucking the daughters of his CO’s, even the ugly ones, plus the occasional stripper looking for a nice G.I. to take her out of her sad life. An honorable discharge and cash for college was the main goal he pushed for, all the while wishing he could jam a steel-toed boot up the ass of anyone carrying a higher rank, as repayment for their attempts at crushing his disobedient will. He didn’t get that chance though and spent the next two years, after discharge, bouncing from one minimum wage job to the next before finally heading back to his hometown to enroll in college. Why it took him so long, he still didn’t understand, but he remembered that each weekend he left the local bar, too drunk to stand without staggering but not drunk enough to dull his disgust with himself for wasting so much precious time. The means to move forward with college were in his bank account now, but he still held back, hesitant and scared, which infuriated him because he used to be fearless when he had his uniform on. He was the same man in or out of that costume, but in it he had more of a reason to be alive. The girl wouldn’t have understood his emotional disconnect or anger he had thought and so, this wasn’t shown to her at first because he had his needs to think about, and he moved on his own time now and no one else’s.

He had picked her out of his younger brother’s high school yearbook about a month after he came back home. “She has nice eyes,” he had said and at the time, he meant it but it wasn’t her eyes he was interested in really. They were nice and all, dark and sexy, but he was in need of something only an innocent could give him. The other, more road- worn girls he had been with floated around his bed in a constant swirl of suspicion, checking his pant pockets for unfamiliar phone numbers scrawled on jagged chunks of napkin, keeping a running tally of the condoms in his bedside drawer like nervous little accountants. He tried to hide his lack of respect for monogamy, taught to him with great skill by his father, but he lacked the same discipline. It was easy enough for him to act all hangdog, just long enough to ease their anger, and once that was accomplished, he found plenty of room to make his escape. His insincere apologies easily glossed over the nastiness of what they didn’t know about him, what they couldn’t even imagine of him.

It was a mission of searching out the prey, detecting their weak points and then disabling any ability to see past his deception just long enough for a satisfying orgasm and maybe even a cold beer or two, if he had time. With his conscience turned off he prided himself with being able to pin a former high school girlfriend, fresh from a heated argument with her husband, up against his battle-scarred headboard as she screamed “You fuck me like he never could,” just hours before he was to meet up with the girlfriend of the moment, for a nice little dinner out and a light romantic comedy. It was just his military training put to good use in the civilian world, nothing more and nothing less.

“Well done soldier!” Followed by a snappy salute in the mirror usually put it all into perspective but when he looked at the girl in the yearbook, page dog-eared from multiple viewing, something in her eyes hinted that she may be different from the others, so, he questioned his brother, rapid-fire interrogation style, about her.

“What is she like? Has she dated any older guys? Do you hang out with her a lot? You think she likes it doggy-style?”

To which his brother replied, face crimson with virginal embarrassment, “God, Sam! You’re such an asshole. She isn’t a whore like you’re used to, so I doubt if she’d even be interested in a nasty old fucker like you.”

“Ohhh! You want to get in her panties, don’t you, baby brother? Did she turn you down? She likes to make you beg for it, doesn’t she?”

“Shut the hell up! I just might tell her all about my fucked-up big brother, Mr. Dick-for-Brains. She’d run away screaming if she saw you.”

“Spoken like a true girl. Jesus, Bryan. Are you two on the rag at the same time too?” He knew he may have gone too far but it made him angry to hear his younger brother assess his life, up to that point, in such a way that made him sound so much worse than he actually thought he was.

“Listen jack-off, if you really think you have a shot in hell with her then come out with us this weekend and I’ll introduce you. I am getting sick of you hanging around the house all the time smoking pot with your loser friends anyway.” His brother’s invitation was more insult than genuine offer of inclusion but he ignored the inference. The kid didn’t know him like he used to.

“Why the hell not? I guess I can come along with you and your little dip-shit friends,” he said with a sneer. “Where are we going?”

“There is a dance after the football game this Friday. You can ride with me. Lauren is meeting us there.”

“Well jeez Junior, that’ll be swell! Can you pass her a note in Study Hall earlier in the day too, telling her I like her?” He hated being such a prick, but his brother left that door wide open.

“Blow me cocksucker! It’s either that or you stay home to jerk-off. I’m doing you a favor remember?” The red quickly returned to his brother’s face, but this time it wasn’t embarrassment but anger that fueled his reply.

“Sorry. All right, but you pay for the beer and I’ll go in and get it. I’m going to need to get drunk for this.”

The sight of a twenty four year old crashing a high school dance was sure to trigger whispers of disapproval from the same old spinster dust-boxes who served as the faculty chaperones back when he had gone to school there. They’d recognize him right away but it was a risk he hadn’t worried about taking as he strolled boldly through those double doors, mission set in place. His brother Bryan murmured something to one of the Ms. Dusty Boxes about how he was just visiting, explaining his presence, but he didn’t bother to speak up for himself, his eyes were already scanning the gymnasium, trying to match girl with picture.

“Where is she?”

“Where is who?” came a voice from behind him.

“Sam, this is Lauren and Lauren this is my fucked-up brother Sam. Bye, dick-head!” Off Bryan ran into the dark gym leaving him standing, face-to-face, with the girl in the picture.

The eyes, much darker in person, reflected his image back at him and in that instant he had nothing to say.

“Nice to meet you. Bryan told me you were in the Army doing the patriotic thing and all but now you are thinking about going to college.”

The uncomfortable pause between them seemed to last hours but then she finally said it. “So, what are you doing at a high school dance?” Not the words he wanted to hear, but she had the right to ask them considering they were both sizing one another up. What he really remembered best about the first conversation he had with the girl, despite a nice buzzed feeling, was her telling him he had “shady eyes,” the eyes of a serial killer she had said.

“You aren’t that far off the mark,” he shot back, surprised by the sting her comment left. He had had much kinder thoughts when he first saw her after all.

“Did I hurt your feelings,” she had said and he almost told her she had, a little, but then caught himself when he realized she was laughing at him.

“Well, aren’t you cute?” That was enough for him. He knew he had to take a shot and see how far he could get in this world.

He couldn’t understand why he was thinking about her, from so long ago, now, on the day he received notice from his wife’s lawyer, that he could come and pick up the property listed as his in their separation agreement. It wasn’t much really, just a few boxes of clothes, his books and the writing journals he had saved from the two years of college he actually completed. It just all got so hard for some reason he recalled, whether it was because he never really knew what he wanted to begin with or it was because the things he dreamed about just weren’t realistic in the first place, he wasn’t quite sure. He did all right working for the local radio station as a sales executive but his wife kept pushing him to do better, go back to school, do this, do that. He didn’t miss the sound of her grating, whining voice at all. Finally, she quit asking anything of him and started nursing school without consulting him. Each semester she wrote a check out of their joint account for her tuition, and he didn’t notice in his increasingly numb state. Once she received her degree, she told him she didn’t need him anymore.

“I want you out of this house you emotionless asshole. Pack your shit and get the hell out by the end of the day or I’ll call the police,” she had said, right in the middle of an important play-off game, one he had waited all week to see. She never had the best timing. She did have nice tits and a so-so ass but the timing thing canceled them out completely.

“That’s a hell of a way to thank me for the tuition money, bitch!” His voice startled the birds roosting in the pines trees that hugged the side of the house.

It wasn’t any use being angry now because he wasn’t sad at all to be away from her and really had no connection to the house or the contents inside, she picked everything out and he just paid for it. If anything, he should feel grateful she released her talons from around his soul and wallet before his hollow body fell lifeless, into a freshly dug hole to be buried by her, with the ashes of discontent by which he had been living his life so far. It was his own fault, he knew it, so the option of moving on and starting over, while a scary one, was much better than grasping on to a dead and bitter tasting marriage, one he should have never committed to in the first place.

It was the “full circle” cliché that pissed him off the most. “One day, Sam, you will get back what you have been giving out,” he had been told. Well that circle came all the fucking way around, turned into a razor sharp serpent-like spear that pierced his head, entering right above his left eye, exiting out his sorry old ass while hissing the whole way! It was a beautiful image really, so poetic.

Lauren had been the only one who made him feel like talking, just jabbering, blah, blah, blah, all over the fucking place without caring if he made any sense at all because whatever he would say she always acted as if it was the wisest shit she ever heard. His wife mostly rolled her eyes at him, asking if he had suffered a self-inflicted brain injury from all the intensive nose picking he openly engaged in just to piss her off, saying this surely caused his stupid blathering. Maybe he simply missed the fact that Lauren was just being polite, but, God, he missed having her listen to him, responding back as if she were, actually, honored to do it. He knew he couldn’t go back after what he had done, so many years ago, and was sure that this nostalgia bullshit was brought on by whatever mid-life crisis/crack-up he was having right now.

Twenty years of saying nothing of real magnitude added to being ignored was a shitty pill to swallow but the realization that he let many good opportunities slip by, out of callous indifference, sucked the self-important wind, he once sailed on, right out of him. Picking through the meager boxes, scattered at his feet, was the task set up for him now and his fingers brushed each memory of himself contained inside with a sadness he had not thought possible. His hands felt rough and damaging on the age-worn scraps of paper, jammed inside thick journals, books he once wrote in constantly but now, volumes his eyes had not scanned in years.

“Jesus. I haven’t thought about these in so long.” The words slipped from his mouth before his brain had a chance to jumble them into the confused state it usually preferred.

A picture sailed to the ground, jostled from its resting place in the back of one of those books that he was now moving from garage floor to car trunk. It landed, face-up, on top of his black dress loafers, a pair of eyes drawing him closer to view their sadness, not in accusation but in brutal reality.

“Well shit! Of course it would have to be a picture of you, wouldn’t it?” The eyes seemed to confirm the double-edged irony he was now experiencing as he bent down to pick the photo up.

A young girl, about five, dressed in a pink tank top and frilly flowered skirt, sat on a red brick porch stoop, posing reluctantly for the camera. She never told him the little girl’s name, all she said was, “she is your daughter,” in the enclosed letter to which he never responded. He had kept the letter and the photo, hidden from his wife for years, at the back of a book she had no interest in looking at because it was his journal of personal thoughts. She was more interested in his earning power than his deep-thinking ability, but that was water way under the fucking bridge now that she was gone and he was standing alone, holding his past.

Lauren was nineteen when she told him she was pregnant. They had been together, off and on, for two years by then and he had been looking for a way to pull away because the obvious devotion and unlimited forgiveness reflected in her eyes each time he strayed got too hard for him to handle. He couldn’t be in her presence anymore without feeling like the lowest form of dog-shit, the type that stayed on shoes despite a good scrapping, foul aroma jamming its way up through the nostrils with each guilty breath. He had told her he would not marry her, would not help her raise any baby and that this was not what he wanted his life to be.

“I think I can get together the money you need for the abortion. My friend John said he would loan me the cash. He knows how much it costs because his girlfriend just had one last year.”

It had sounded like a rock-solid plan, no room for discussion, just decided, done and over but she cried and begged him to reconsider.

“This isn’t just about you, Sam! Do you even want to know what I want?”

He stopped her, shaking hands grasped her shoulders tighter than necessary, causing her to cry out as he repeated the plans for his life that just wouldn’t leave any room for her or a baby to be written in.

The call was placed; he had made the appointment for her and said to be ready at 8 A.M that Friday. When the time came she did as she was told, but when he returned later to pick her up, the clinic staff said she had left but he hadn’t thought to ask if it was before or after the procedure and to be perfectly honest he hadn’t cared. He was glad she wasn’t there because the thought of looking into those eyes, that constantly begged for the love he was too fucking selfish to relinquish, had made him feel all nervous and sweaty, not at all what he needed.

That was that and he had believed she removed herself from his life, nice and tidy, just as easily as the doctor had removed their little mistake but it turned out that loose end was allowed to grow anyway, without his knowledge. Despite his fleeting moments with guilt over the years he kept coming back to the fact that Lauren never even asked him to be involved, provide support for or even acknowledge the little girl in the picture and when he had his sons he felt the guilt again, briefly, but by then the numbness was working better. She had always taken him at his word, so willing to please but he never had the time to listen to or respect what she had wanted her life to be like. He wanted to believe that of her but suspected that it was more likely she just didn’t want him near her or her daughter.

“I have a daughter.” The words said, aloud, touched air for the first time in a strangled scream and he felt like choking, throat tightening around each breath sucked in.

His life, scattered before him, boxes of lies, books filled with conceit and disloyal insincerity mocked his imagined newfound freedom. The picture was real, Lauren was real and his daughter was as well but did they even think about him now? Did he even have the right to think this given the sorry way he had treated them, ignoring them just like his wife had done with him but much worse? Another rotation of that fucking circle was more than he could take, its driver, Karma, speeding home her revenge in sweet style.

“God knows I am a fucking asshole but for some reason he still allows me to breath! Where is the sense in that?” The birds had no answer for him as they once again scattered, fearful of his outbursts.

Slowly, he closed his car’s trunk, life’s contents inside, waiting to be taken to his small apartment near the radio station. The next morning he knew he would get up and go to work, acting as if nothing was different except inside, his rediscovered nastiness would pick at him, reminding him what a piece of shit he still was and always would be, forever.

His hand slid along the side of the car, grasping the driver side door handle, inside he would be safe from his thoughts. Fumbling with his keys, he hit the ignition first and then the garage door opener. The car’s engine hummed softly in the near empty space, the large white door slowly came down behind him, and he waited for the clarity he thought he was seeing when he first looked up into the sky that day.