A Taste of Spaghetti

The movie’s sky went dark as the credits rolled northward on the blackening screen. Arnett could go now.

He rose from the charcoal-gray sofa, picked up the remote from the coffee table, and stared down at what was left of the spaghetti. She had made it exactly a year ago, before leaving for the night shift at the hospital. He still had the yellow post-it. It said “I can’t wait to get home in the morning. Love ya!” He had put the spaghetti into the freezer after reading the note and placing it square in the middle of the aluminum foil. He would read it 365 times in the next year. Then he would decide whether she and Bob Sackin would live or die.
He let the credits continue to roll because he liked Ennio Morricone, and the haunting beauty of the credit music helped him with his resolve. He returned the remote to the coffee table, silently, as if Laura and Bob would hear him from Bob’s house in Port Royal, and picked up the spaghetti plate. Carrying it to the kitchen and setting it in the sink without the fork moving a millimeter, he made his decision. 365 days had passed by even faster than the 241 days Laura had shared Arnett’s house with him, and of course far more swiftly than the six days in which he knew about Bob after coming home three days early from his trip to Chicago and finding Laura’s note on Bob’s spaghetti.
He had flown back to Chicago that night, panicked at the new fact, new to him anyway, that his life would not be spent with her, that his children would not also be hers, that she would not be holding his hand as he took his last breath in the comfort of knowing they would be together as souls forever upon the last breath of her own.
They had known he knew as soon as she asked Bob if he liked the spaghetti. What they had not known was that they had a year to persuade Arnett to spare their lives. When she had called him the next morning after not being able to wait to get home to Bob, he answered the bleating of his cell phone with an instruction: “Leave the spaghetti. At least leave the spaghetti. I want to try your spaghetti.” She had protested that he was being dramatic in his sarcasm, or maybe it was sarcastic in his drama. He couldn’t remember which. And she had been sorry, so sorry. It was just a fling, she said.
Arnett rinsed the spaghetti plate, 365 days after freezing it. He scrubbed it clean with a drop of Palmolive and an old Brillo pad. Holding the plate to the light to make sure there was no food on it, satisfied that it was clean, he smashed it on the stainless steel rim of the sink, shards clattering and clinking onto the Spanish tile floor before settling back into the atmosphere of Ennio Morricone.
“It was just a fling,” he whispered.
He turned and opened the drawer to the right of the refrigerator. He reached to the back of the drawer and retrieved the black Walther his father had given him on his 25th birthday, three weeks after Arnett was robbed at gunpoint in a home invasion back when he lived in the beaten-up cottage in Burton.
They would be surprised, of course. Shocked, even. Arnett knew that he didn’t seem like the type to take drastic action on anything at all. Yet in fifteen minutes they would see what he had in him. And so would he.
He picked up his cell phone and dialed her number. She answered by saying his name. She sounded friendly. Arnett chose the same tone.

“I just finished the spaghetti,” he said. “Thank you.”

“David, no!” She sounded frantic.
“It was delicious,” Arnett said.
“David, just hold on. Stay right there. Don’t you do anything! I will be right—”
Arnett was surprised, just for a millisecond, to recognize the love in her voice. And then he was gone, beating the last descending strings of another Morricone masterpiece.

–T.D. Johnston, Flash Fiction Magazine