Chuck Palahniuk: Phoenix

“Your father,” she begins. “He thinks that if the dishes and the toilet are black to begin with, they never get dirty.”

Their last night in Ted’s house, Rachel had stepped into the living room. She’d rushed inside from the cold. She’d intentionally turned down the thermostat, hoping to make the pilot light more attractive. To set her trap, she’d buried tuna fish in the crushed gravel. That night, she’d walked into the dark room, into the shadow cast by the Christmas tree, and seen two yellow eyes blinking at her from the fireplace. A little drunk, she’d said, “I’m sorry.”

On the phone in Orlando, very drunk, she says, “I wasn’t sorry.”

Rachel had told the cat goodbye, and she’d flipped the switch. The click-click-click, like the tapping of a white cane. The banshee scream. Flames raced up the living room curtains. Flames raced up the stairs. In the end, the insurance company couldn’t prove definitively that any chemical residue wasn’t the scorched remains of dry-cleaning plastic.

Saying this, she senses that April has become a stranger. Someone separate who must be respected and deserves to know the truth. April has split away to become another person. “Your daddy stalling is the reason why you’ll never see a sunset.”

The silence could’ve been anyone or no one. If it’s April, she won’t understand, not until she’s older.

Rachel says, “I only chose your father because he’s weak. I married him because I knew I could push him around.” She says that the problem with passive people is that they force you to take action. After that, they hate you for it. They never forgive you. Only then, over the phone, clear and unmistakable, does Rachel hear Ted begin to weep. It’s nothing she hasn’t heard before, but this time his sobs build until, like blasts from a whistle, a child screams. Like a smoke alarm, a high-pitched frantic child’s shriek erupts, sirening from the telephone.

Rachel’s goading has worked. He coerced, controlled, and steered her into hurting something innocent; now they’re even.

With her child’s screams and her husband’s weeping still loud in her ears, Rachel gazes at a gigantic revolving diamond, entranced, trying to divine the new future as she whispers, “Goodnight.”