Young Writers Society

Erm...this is kinda a sidetracking from a bigger story I'm writing...just wrote it last night so if you have any editing suggestions I'd very much appreciate them.

Solomon Whiteheart hated his wife. Hated her with the fiery passion of a thousand burnings souls, and yet loved her so dearly that he simply couldn’t bring himself to break her heart. If she even had one. As far as he was concerned, Rose Delafontay was the single source of all his pain, suffering and resulting sin. She, he was convinced, was the devil incarnate. Strong words for a man who claims he’ll have no part in the bleedin’ poppycock that is religion. Still, he may have been right, and as he dutifully served his promised life sentence in her home, the deep loathing grew. In all their marriage, they had made love five times. To each other, that is. Sol had a number of women on his rounds who promised secrecy and pleasure for a few dollars. The guilt he felt for betraying his one-and-beloved – not matter which evil soul inhabited her body, she was still his wife – was a heavy burden, and it may well be that it was this guilt that kept him married up until the day that he died, which was, one might add, fairly soon in the whole scheme of things. See, Sol was not a bad man. He did not want to be the one who broke the family, who broke the hearts. All he had ever asked the Almighty for was a steady job and perhaps a family when he grew older. And that he got, along with responsibilities he had never expected. Some of them he should have seen coming, others – well let’s say one could see why he was bitter. But though Rose could be blamed for his vices, only he could be blamed for marrying her. For it had been he, Solomon Gregory Whiteheart, aged 33, who had knelt down on bended knee, not three days after he had met her, and asked her if she would share her life with him. He soon learned that being a romantic fool rarely paid off, much as Hollywood would like to say otherwise. Not only was he now married, but to a woman he would grow to hate.

Along with the unexpected responsibilities off married life, Sol had to deal with children. Six of them, to be exact. He shuddered to think what would have happened had Rose given into his pleas to come to bed during the years between each birth. She was a fucking hot house, she was. That or he was some kind of superman. Four out of five times, pregnant. This didn’t add up to Sol. He had specifically counted each time they’d gone to bed together, marked it in his little leather book. There were five marks there, each in a different color pen. He couldn’t even make a proper fucking rainbow. And yet he had six children. He was afraid she’d name them something awful, something like Isachar or Job. Or worse - Zebulum. But no, for once she did something tolerable and named them perfectly normally, or at least names no one would mock them for in later years.

It wasn’t until the first five were there that he noticed his mistake. It all played out too perfectly, right into her waiting hands. It was almost like she’d planned it – in fact, he was certain she had, knew she had screwed him over – and he was even more afraid of her now than ever. She knew things. She was a she-devil, and she wouldn’t hesitate to use her powers. How she had known that, in those years, she would have the perfect number of children to concoct her sick schemes, he would never know. How she had known that she would produce a girl, then two sets of goddamn twins, all boys, and then another to tie off the lot, Sol could not begin to guess. But it only strengthened his misgivings.

He would try to foil her in his little ways, little, almost unnoticeable ways that were the only revenge he dared. When company came, Rose – in that sugary, loving way that made him fantasize about pulling out his hand gun (not that he had a hand gun) and silencing her once and for all – would ask him to please introduce the guests to their children. They’d trail out soberly, the girl always trying to look her best and the youngest ones picking incessantly at scabs, buttons and elbows, in chronological order, in the order they had pushed themselves past their mother’s loins and into the light, and Sol would swear under his breath and, one hand clutching his clinking glass, one hand on a head, would shuffle them until they were satisfyingly random. “This,” he’d say through clenched teeth, “is John, Matthew, Mary, Mark and Luke.” And Rose, unfailing, would laugh and twirl her finger in a manner suggesting a rearrangement. “No, honey,” she’d croon, “Say it the other way. It’s so cute that way.” And Sol, resisting the urge to dig out the hand gun he didn’t have, would point dejectedly at each child (not necessarily the right one) and roll off, “Mary, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.” And then, in case this brutal obviousness had escaped their guests, he would roll his eyes back into his head, tip the glass back into his waiting mouth and swallow loudly before continuing flatly (at Rose’s encouraging urgings): “Y’know, like the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ. And then the prophets ‘at wrote about ‘im.” And then his part in the evening would be done, and he go out smoking with his buddies.

When the sixth came, Sol seriously considered running for his life, taking what was left of his grandfather’s fortune and moving to sunny Aruba. When he did finally manage to find the guts to visit his wife in the maternity ward, he immediately fell to his knees by her side and buried his face in her bloated stomach, next to the wailing boy. “Don’t call ‘im it, Rosie, don’t do it,” he blubbered through slimy tears. She waited patiently, stroking his thinning hair and clicking her tongue in a manner suggesting attempted comfort. “Please, it you never do a thing for me again, don’t call him Jesus.”

Rose had been quite taken aback, and she had reached out tenderly to scoop her husband’s chin into her hand. She looked into his glazed blue eyes, searching for an answer to an unasked question.

“Honey! Why would you think such a thing? No child of mine, however beautiful, can take the name of our Lord. Now I know some Hispanic families do it, but that’s no reason for you to jump to conclusions.”

He sighed then, a pure, heavy sigh of relief and total salvation.

“No, dear, the boy is called Christian.”

Sol left the room then, left the room and entered another, where he promptly vomited into the hands of a mother-to-be.