I’d like to thank Jeremy Merillat for his submission ‘The Cure For Pain’, a poetic and touching tribute to his wife, who’s kisses he says “are the cure for most of the maladies experienced by our boys and me alike.”
Jeremy Merillat is a husband and father of 2 young boys and an emerging writer based in Budapest. His nonfiction has appeared in The Piker Press and The Potato Soup Journal and his fiction was recently long listed in the 2020 Fiction Factory Short Story Competition. You can find him on Facebook and Instagram.
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The Cure For Pain
The rising sun shone brightly through green leaves, illuminating his Pacific-blue eyes, from which flowed great tears down his pudgy cheeks. The boy raised his hands skyward, displaying freshly abraded palms caked with mud-laced gravel and tinged by smears of blood.
“What happened sweetheart?” his mother asked, panting from her dash through the garden. She knelt down and grasped his cherubic wrists in her slender hands and turned his palms upright. “Oh, my poor baby.”
The child stared beyond his mother, his eyes fixed on the injustice of such pain while his weeping slowly subsided until he could say, through choking sobs, “I fell.”
“Aw, I’m so sorry,” she said, quickly removing the larger pieces of rubble from his hands. “Let’s go inside,” she offered. “We can put a plaster on it; you’ll feel much better.”
“No, Mummy,” the boy said and looked directly at his mother.
“Well, we have to clean this up,” she said, “look how dirty it is.”
He pursed his lips together, triggering the surrounding muscles to unfurl into a frown around his quivering chin. A sobbing gasp escaped, and he regained his composure enough to clarify, “But it huuuurts.”
She sat, where she previously knelt, and pulled her little boy into her lap, the concrete was still cool, but warming quickly with the rising sun. “I’m so sorry, baby boy,” she whispered into the feathery curls that graced his ears. “Let’s clean this up, you’ll feel much better, I know you will.”
“No, Mummy,” he repeated, and pushed himself up against her knees, leaving a nearly perfect outline of his injuries upon her newly washed jeans. He turned and faced her, the perplexity of an insatiable need replacing the look of genuine pain upon his face.
“Shall I give you a kiss?” she asked, rising to her knees.
A fissure of vulnerability appeared beneath the impenetrable mask, and the boy brought his arms together, palms up, and extended them towards his mother.
“Mwa.” She kissed the first hand, and then, holding both hands firmly, kissed the other. “Mwa.”
He sniffed, and she kissed his cheek.
“Is that better?” she asked.
He smiled and stretched out a single finger that graced her nose.
“Let’s clean your hands up now, Ok?”
She swept him up and tossed him into the sky. He came down giggling into her hands and then sat snugly upon her hip as she whisked him back to the house. Later that evening she tucked him into bed, shut the door to his room and listened as he exchanged serene whispers with the stuffed animals surrounding him.
Outside she heard gravel crunching beneath the slowing wheels of her husband’s car. She stepped out onto the terrace and grasped the rapidly cooling rail in her hands, directing her attention towards the ritual in the driveway below. The lights went out, the engine shut down, the door opened, and her husband stepped into the glow of the moon. She sauntered down the stairs to the living room and took a seat upon their seasoned couch just as he entered the house.
“Hi sweetheart, are you hungry?” she called out.
“No, thank you,” he whispered, and when he turned after setting his brief case down, she saw despair etched throughout the familiar contours of his face.
“What’s wrong?” she said, rising from her spot on the couch.
“I’ve been let go.”
“Come, sit with me,” and she took his worn hands into her own. “Did they say why?”
They sat, in assumed positions, melded into one another by force of habit as much as source of comfort. He replayed the events of the conversation in his mind again and the stinging force of the initial news, his rush to defend himself and his value to the company all came rushing back. He saw their patronizing smiles and the cynicism with which they made notes as he plead for them to reconsider.
“Yes,” he said. “They did, but it was just formalities that didn’t really mean anything at all.”
“Perhaps we should eat,” she offered. “You’ll feel better and we can talk about it.”
He swallowed, and after a concentrated blink, a single tear strayed almost imperceptibly from his eye and slid to a stop at the corner of his lips. “What are we going to do?” he asked, and he wanted to explain his fear of the unknown, the loss he felt from hearing those whom he had grown to trust saying that he was no longer in their employment, and the financial uncertainties they would have to face if he did not find another job soon. He stopped though, knowing his voice would certainly fail.
“Shall I give you a kiss?” she asked.
He wiped his eyes, ashamedly, then turned to face her.
She leaned in and kissed his tear-stained cheek, letting her lips linger; he grasped her wrists in his hands and then she rotated his head until their lips touched. He breathed her kiss in deeply and when she finished, she asked, “Is that better?”
He opened his eyes and traced a single finger across her face.
“I’ll get our dinner going,” she suggested, and stood. He stayed but held her hand firmly.
“You’ll kiss me again later?” he asked, his eyes shimmering like the surface of a pool.
“I’ll kiss you again,” she promised, and turned to walk into the kitchen.
He remained on the couch for a moment, and then took a deep breath, stood, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. “I’ll be right in, he said, but she didn’t hear him over the sizzling garlic and melting butter.
He stepped outside on to the deck in bare feet and stretched his palms skyward, into the soft glow of the moon, whose beams bounced among the shadowy leaves.
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