WRATH(Charles E.J. Moulton) WRATH

A Short Story by Charles E.J. Moulton

I feared for my life. I had to admit that to myself. It wasn’t so much that I had not seen him angry before, it was only that I now saw him waving that gun around and screaming like a maniac.
Sure, my intensity also knew no bounds and I could also be seen waving my hands about and shouting. But I would never grab a gun in rage, especially not here at home and especially not in front of Mark. I didn’t even know why we had the damn thing here, anyway.
Mark and I had often been seen screaming at each other at such a loud volume that our neighbors threatened to call the cops on us. Mark’s boss, Principal Ishaan Gupta, had once told Mark that if he controlled his temper he had a promising career as an Egyptologist ahead of him. Not only did Mark inspire his students, he also assisted in plenty excavations and that gave Mark an extra advantage as a lecturer. He could tell the students more about mummification and more about archeology because he had had first-hand knowledge. But with his short temper as intense as it was right now, blowing his fuses was easy and the principal of the university threatened to fire him if he didn’t calm down.
So, here I was, the balcony door open and wind in my hair, clutching my coffee cup and watching my husband clutching not a coffee cup, but a Colt .45, ranting and raving like a criminal because he wanted to go kill the mayor.
“That bastard,” he screamed, “he cut the funds the history department has been receiving for years. We need those damn funds. We need education in this country. The world is going down the tubes as it is. Without education the world is lost. I will go to that frigging maniac and I will pull this trigger in his face and splatter blood all over his million dollar Armani suit. I will blow his brains out.”
Those last words rang out past the open balcony door and onto the empty Sunday street. A dog barked, a gust of wind ruffled my hair and I felt a tear rolling down my right cheek. The edges of my mouth twitched. I stuttered, wondering if the words I wanted to utter would help him calm down or force him to actually take closer action and really go through with it.
“He won’t be in his office today,” I whispered. “If you want to shoot him, you have to find out where he lives or wait until the morning. But I won’t visit you in jail, dear.”
Mark looked at me with those wide open and crazy eyes of his. I saw those wheels in his head turning, the cogs clicking like crazy along with the trigger. I tried to decipher if there were bullets in that gun. If not, I could go up to him and take away the gun. He was not angry at me, but I wouldn’t be taking any chances.
“You’re scaring me, Mark,” I said, taking one step out on our balcony. I lift my coffee cup to my unmade morning lips, Revlon yet a stranger to them and L’Oreal yet a mystery to my tired cheeks. The coffee was strong, infecting my heart and making it thump hard in my chest, so hard that I felt it beating in my throat. The coffee didn’t help either, but I felt my coffee-addiction soaring to new heights as I held it to my cute and decorative bosom.
That odd feeling of an irregular heartbeat caused by overpowering stress now completely dominated my existence. Mark would never hurt me. That much was sure. But his finger on the trigger could easily slip and turn a difficult situation into a catastrophe. I took a deep breath and spoke to him, my head glancing over my shoulder. “Mark, put the gun away. There is no need for nonsense like that. You can’t change anything by being silly.”
“Silly?” Mark screamed again and I jumped. I heard something heavy drop on what must’ve been the gun being thrown on the living room table. “Josie, that guy is cutting funds for culture and education so often that we soon will not have no money to educate our young with. We won’t be able to keep all the departments running. Damn hypocrite.”
Mark rushed out on the balcony and I felt a stinging pain in my side as he stood beside me. His anger scared me. His intensity became too overpowering for me. He stamped his foot on the balcony floor; he banged his fist on the railing, frothed at the mouth and breathed heavily.
I took one long look at him, examining his ill will and suddenly I had the sensation of looking at a lunatic. I couldn’t take him seriously. One thought crossed my mind and I glanced back at that Colt .45 lying on the dark brown table. Without further ado, I rushed into the living room and away from the balcony, setting my half full coffee cup down on the table in the process. I didn’t wait. I picked up that heavy and really dangerous thing; let it rest in my hand, very much realizing that this weapon was the cause of so much ill will and so many calamities. The click was subtle and as I checked the gun for bullets I saw there were none there. Not one single bullet in that damn thing.
Mark still stood out there and probably knew that I was checking that weapon. He still stomped his foot, bashed his fist, frothed and breathed heavily. “I know, Josie. No bullets. No damn bullets. The bullets are in the safe in my office. I have never used them. I won’t, either. I’ll sell the darned thing. I’m just a chicken, a yellow-belly that has no other agenda than blowing his fuses. Damn it, I am just a loud maniac with no guts.”
The gun lay cold and senseless in my grasp, such a neutral object the cause of so much pain. I lay it back on the table, walking out in my slippers and my bathrobe onto the balcony again. I exhaled, my breath coming out in spurts. He had called himself a coward. I couldn’t believe it, but that was good news. Very good news.
Mark had now stopped stomping, bashing and frothing. A sad and resigned posture came over him as he shuffled over to the balcony table and sat down. I remained standing where I stood, looking at him and from time to time glancing over my shoulder at the gun that lay there on the living room table. To me, at the time at least, it seemed poignant that the gun lay there on the table unloaded and that he had been waving it about like crazy a moment ago. I remembered myself reaching for the kitchen knife and stabbing it around like crazy in the empty and lonely and hot air after a horribly bad business meeting.
I sighed, looking at the man I had married out of love. How I had admired him and still admired him. His wit, his brains, his spirit was an inspiration.
How difficult he also could be.
“Why are you so intense, Mark?”
I took his hand, caressed it, lift it and kissed it.
He looked at his own hand with the remainder of my damp kiss. I left my hand lying on his lap as he withdrew his hand in irritation.
“I don’t know. Maybe I am just a dumbass.”
I shook my head, laughing cynically to myself more than to him.
“No, just intense.”
Mark looked out onto the forest that lay close to our apartment. His eyes searched the skies for clouds. I could see that he desperately wanted to understand what was happening and why he reacted this way.
“I wish I hadn’t opened my mailbox.”
“You found the mail from the university in the internet just now?”
He nodded. “I was so angry I felt like killing someone.”
I caressed him again.
“That wouldn’t solve anything.”
“That would certainly eliminate the bad guys.”
“And turn you into one.”
“How so?”
“Every revolution in history has ended in a crisis.”
Mark looked up at me, baffled, still slumped over like a monkey in his depression. “What’s revolution got to do with this?”
Our eyes met. It was an intense gaze, a familiar gaze that astounded me. Rather quaint, rather honest, rather open, rather hopeful, rather expectant.
“Everything.”
I paused, waiting. Then I spoke, knowing I had to because he wouldn’t.
“You wanted to kill the mayor just like the peasants of Paris wanted to kill Marie Antoinette in 1789. But ten years later, Napoleon came and crowned himself emperor and turned back the clock. It was as if nothing had happened and thousands of people had died for that nothing. The same thing happened in ancient Rome. They killed Julius Caesar because he wanted to make himself a dictator. What happened?”
Mark looked at me with that open gaze of his. No anger there anymore, he was obviously keen on calming down. “His death eventually gave birth to the empire Rome. So the opposite of what they wanted came true.”
“Just like in France. Revolutions are pointless.”
Mark looked out into the morning sunrise. “That happened in the Soviet Union, as well. I never thought of that.”
I laughed. “It surprises me, you being a historian and all. I mean, the Russian Tsar Regime tumbled by the communist hands because they hated the absolutism. But come on, what happened made it worse. Communism turned into a worse dictatorship than anything the Tsars ever could have come up with.”
“KGB, Illuminati, Bilderberg, Skull and Bones,” Mark said. “We have to fight oppression and corruption somehow.”
I shrugged, closing my eyes in a kind of soft and resigning gesture.
“We have to find other ways to raise awareness.”
I don’t know how long we sat there watching the sunrise, but I really felt like we were experiencing the peaceful rest after a storm. At least until Mark’s cellular phone started making noises. A series of small bleeps emerged and I was left there on the balcony hoping that he wouldn’t take the gun in his hand and go into the office in order to get the bullets. I prayed, oh, how I prayed for his safe return without the gun.
My heart pumped my blood quicker and quicker around my veins. I saw myself divorcing my husband because of “irreconcilable differences”. In actual fact, I would be saving myself from having to deal with his anger, even if it was just rage that was directed at others. But Mark returned happily to the balcony, not with the gun but with his Samsung Smartphone. That made me laugh. My husband came back not with a gun, but with a phone.
He was smiling from ear to ear.
“As I said,” he mused. “Dumbass.”
As I read the text message on his Smartphone, hope again arose in my heart and I felt that maybe, just maybe, my husband could work on handling his illogical and quite manic behavior. And although the letters on the display to me only looked like meaningless lines and dots invented by some long bearded Greek guy years ago, the meanings of those letters meant the world to me. They meant peace, children and stability. These words meant hope and love and passion.
“Dear Mark, you may have received an incorrect mail this morning that you need to delete. In it, an unknown hacker claims that city funds, aimed for withdrawal, originally favor the university alumni. The mail is a spam and shall be regarded only as junk-mail. The mayor, in fact, is going to raise the financial assets that benefit our campus and its staff. So, don’t worry and don’t reach for your gun. Not today or any day. Have a nice Sunday, Mark, and thanks for good work. Ishaan.”
I saw Mark’s boss in my mind’s eye, his long Indian moustache twitching and his nougat skin glowing in the morning sunlight while he wrote the mail in the comfort of his own home, hoping to give Mark enough willpower to overcome his choleric outbursts. Ishaan Gupta had been chosen as University Principal because of his intellectual capabilities and capacity, but also because of his adept way in helping people and inspiring them to do good things and inspire other people.
Mark gazed into my eyes, his inner uneasiness subsiding like a storm coming to a rest. We said nothing to each other, not with many words anyway. All that had to be said was that he knew he had been wrong about the mayor and that he had to control his violent temper in the future.
As the Sunday morning slowly turned into a Sunday noon, we kissed, stood up, walking through our living room into a still darkened bed chamber. Once in there, we undressed and made passionate love, rediscovering the symbiosis of nuptial bliss. Doing so, we realized that all the revolutionaries had been wrong. The Hippie Generation had been right. Making love and not war was the right way to go. If physical or spiritual, love certainly was the answer. In fact, I believed then and there, laying there in my husband’s arms, feeling his gender thrust inside me and intensely explode his semen into my body, that there was no such thing as physical love.
Love, always spiritual and always tender, answered every one of my inquiries.
This inquiry had almost conjured up eternal hell.
It brought me heaven.
And the gun that lay on the living room table belonged far away from our grasp. Mark had experienced a quick anger based on a false piece of information and he would have made himself a criminal because of that information. That didn’t happen. Our guardian angels stopped that from happening. In fact, we had been saved.
Could love beat corruption?
We could only wait and see.
We were making love and that was all that mattered.


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CHARLES E.J. MOULTON has performed in 105 stage productions (Musicals, Opera, Plays), sung many kinds of music (Opera, Operetta, Musical, Hard Rock, Rock, Pop, Disco, Funk, Swing, Jazz). He is the chorus master of numerous choruses in Germany and his song "TIME" ("Tiden") has been performed by a Swedish Chorus.

Among his three dozen other published literary pieces, included in academic journals, newspapers and magazines, you will also find: "A Match Made in Heaven" (TWJ Magazine, August 2014), "Crack of Doom" and "The Next Turtle" (Aphelion, August 2014), "Catherine - The Faithful Queen Dowager" (Socrates - The World's Leading Academic Journal, June 2014), "Vocal Technique" (The Woven Tale Press, April 2014), "Future Memories" (Contemporary Literary Review India, November 2013) and "Echoes of a Fairytale" (Skirmish, July 2013). He has also built up a considerable online platform for himself through online blogs and posted literary work, gathering a worldwide following of by now several hundred thousand people.

Charles is the son of opera singer Gun Kronzell-Moulton (1930 - 2011) and author, actor, baritone, dialogue-coach, English teacher and radio speaker Herbert Eyre Moulton (1927 - 2005), who all can be searched and researched in the web, among others under

https://about.me/cmoulton
https://about.me/hmoulton
https://about.me/gkronzell

The Moulton Family has many short stories and articles posted in the web, among others in Story Star. Feel free to browse. Enjoy the literature.

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