Word Count: 186
His knuckles were big purple grapes that matched the trail like spilled drops of wine on her breast.
It was learned behavior on both his part and hers. Both came from families where wives and children were beaten. Neither learned to avoid rather than mimic the family script.
It happens. It happens again and again in the pretty little cape down the street, where the lawn is lush clipped green and runs in straight lines around porches and bushes and gardens where dahlias bloom and the black tongue of driveway where his gray sedan sits smugly next to her overweight blue SUV.
It happens on the second floor of a low long brick tenement where the halls smell of Wednesday’s fried pork chops and Friday night’s meatless spaghetti sauce. The woman, a gray tiny mouse to the man’s burly black bear.
Wherever it is, in the land of ice where it comes from dark days and no electricity and boredom, to the blazing lit motion of Vegas, the impetus deeper than a moment of anger, the reason the actors replay the scene is always family script.
