She found him in the front yard, her husband of eleven years. He was standing there in the dark holding a shotgun.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked, never thinking that he might harm her.
“I don’t want you to leave me,” he said, standing still with the shotgun resting in his arms.
“Come on in the house,” she said. She held the door open. “I’m not going to leave.”
So he did. He put the gun in the closet, in their bedroom and went to bed—the two of them laying side by side, not touching.
© Glenda Kotchish
January 2019