(experimental fiction... because I'm starting to wonder why I have to write all these horror/fantasy stories...lol... a second draft)

The Hell Hole
By John Miller

“I’ll meet you tomorrow,” she tells him over his cell phone.

He tries to laugh silently, but he cannot help the sound of his doubt. Her response is to chuckle lightly. What is she chuckling at? he wonders. Does she laugh alongside him, or at him?

“Well, it’s almost time to punch in for work,” she groans. “Time for the hell-hole.”

“Okay, sweetie,” he replies with emphasis on “sweetie” as if he means it. He tells himself he doesn’t mean it, that he doesn’t love her. He lies to himself—he’s so confused. Over and over he lies to himself until he feels that, perhaps, it isn’t a lie and he doesn’t need this married woman he has loved and waited on for years.

“If I can’t meet you tomorrow,” she soothes, “I’ll call you.”

He hangs up and goes to bed telling, trying to force himself to believe that he doesn’t need her, bombarding his conscious mind against the subconscious forces within, those dark forces that threaten to overlap reality and bring him to his knees… again. The reason his eyes close, he thinks, is because he doesn’t need her. He can go to sleep, he realizes, because he’s free… strong. When his eyes shut he sees her, naked, feels her body heat saturating his flesh and soul, unmasked desire cradling burning desire and making it known to every facet of his senses.

When he wakes in the morning he doesn’t remember his dreams. He merely knows he dreamt of her… again. He smells her, feels the warmth on the extra pillow as if she’d shared his bed. They have some sort of connection that brings her to him when he most needs her. “Don’t do this to yourself,” he chides himself. “Don’t get lost in her promises… don’t believe her when she says she’ll meet you.”

His eyes glisten, but it’s from the dryness of his room. He stumbles into the dresser because his mind is lost in her. “What am I doing?” Oh, yes! A shower and then breakfast. Alone. It is his day off. She worked third-shift. She’ll call when she wakes before she goes to fetch her children from school. After showering he makes toast and scrambled eggs.

She doesn’t call.

He tries to convince himself how he doesn’t need her, how he is strong. “I don’t have to love her,” he talks to the walls and paces. “I don’t have to live this way.”

Yet he does live this way, just as he’s lived this way for years, because no one has touched him the way she has—or perhaps its because he’s never opened up to anyone as much as he opened his heart to her. Either way it doesn’t matter because she hasn’t called… again.

He knows he will live this way for many years. The uncomfortable silences get easier, like getting used to living with pain. That’s all it is really: pain.

He gets in his car to drive. Anywhere. He browses radio stations and a familiar song comes on. He cannot remember its name until the chorus strikes like lightning:

Love hurts, love scars,
Love wounds, and marks...

He turns the channel and turns a corner, feels time slipping past like unread pages, and he cries. He keeps on driving, until he tunes in another channel, finds himself in a different State listening to a different song.

His cell phone rings. It's her.

"Where are you?" she asks seductively.

"I'll be there in two and a half hours," he says.

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