The girl is Evening, or Dusk, or maybe she’s Night just after the clouds have all huddled on each other’s back for a sleepover.

Sometimes it’s hard to know.

If you’d prefer, you can call the girl Black or White, but please don’t call her Blue. She’s supposed to be a happy thing.

Blue is, of course, blue, though once in a while it turns cruel, a different hue: blueberry, bruised-blue.
But that’s not her.

Oh sure, a knuckle can be hairy or it can be a knife when parlayed. You should see it slice!

And a knot is a cord is a swelling is a golf ball egg-sized thing on the noggin for, “Talking back.”

“Never again,” is {…}

“Never again” is a stripe of light, like an illuminated siren, beneath the morning bedroom door when she’s spent a night on the couch.

“Nothing,” is nothing.

Nothing is natural about this.

“Nothing” is fair.

“Nothing” is unfair.

Tonight she is a siren dressed in a negligee and heels, bejeweled with bangles, baubles, and bracelets, wearing perfume clouds. She clinks and clatters like a rusted cowbell.

Something shatters when he tells her, “I said, ‘Red!’”

Crimes against humanity are usually acts of insanity. She read a version of that in a stall at the Chevron station when she was bolder and considering fleeing.

“Aw, come here. I won’t hurt you. Massage my back.”

Some people live their whole lives with a crooked spine, giving them back pain and reasons for retribution, they believe.

“Lower. Harder.”

Her Daddy was a bitter man, but not this.

“Damn it!”

Blood is a bold color. Especially when fresh, still warm, running down the bridge of the nose like a loose bolt of lightning.

Sometimes it runs right off, spackling the floor in bright bombs, a dozen or so red pennies, a Pollack painting, a plea, a marker, evidence of the butcher that this man–her husband–is.