Lights Out (Horrible Marriages Collection)

(A story originally created as a submission to "The Big Ugly Review", for which I never received a receipt notification. It seems my little story might have simply been the last ugly straw for a seven-issue flash, but who knows - maybe they were just hiding from me. It's a Horrible Marriage story. -
Here it is so I don't feel like I totally wasted a handful of small words.)

“We were robbed.” 

She pushed the words forward against the carpet as she crawled.

“We what?”

“Robbed.”

Rusty wiggled around on hands and knees, nicked his chin on the edge of a side table and hissed, “This is what I’m talking about, Mare. This kind of thing, it’ll ruin us!”

He pulled the black mask up to his nose, felt the damage and eyed his wife angrily. 

In the unfamiliar room, soft moonlight crisscrossed with sharp shadows over her black bodysuit. Her full, pouting lips struck through the hole in her mask – those bright blue eyes - Mary filled the image of everything he loved about her in that very moment: the daring, the sexy innocence, the romantic thrill-seeker. She’s killing me, he thought, but…

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I just feel like we’ve been robbed here.”

And the moment was over.

Rusty yanked his mask down and hissed through the mouth-hole, “You and me, we’re robbing this house and you say, ‘We were robbed.’ He trembled. “That’s what’s costing us! That’s why we’re in therapy! That’s why we’re robbing this house to pay for that therapy!

Mary rolled gently onto her back in the plush carpet, held up the empty black sack and waved it theatrically. “Does this look familiar, Rusty? It’s our take tonight. Empty! Looks like most other nights!” 

Saying it brought tears of regret to her eyes, a mad torrent of haphazard regrets.

“Mare! Mare! Hang on now! Shhhh!” he ‘shushed’ her, didn’t want to. Her crying was so important - he’d learned in therapy without really understanding why – but he had to ‘shush’ her because of the headlights arcing, bouncing, filling the whole room, accompanied by the sound of an engine cutting off and…

“Mare! Mare! You can cry later, I promise you – I know it’s important to you, I swear it! but we gotta go! Now!

Rusty tried cool for Mary but instead stumbled over the hardwood floor off the living room and skinned his forehead on the dining room breakfront. 

Mary kept one eye on her husband’s enthusiasm and another on the front door as she effortlessly rolled through the darkened house.

They’d made it to the rear door of the house, stood on its threshold when they heard the keys, the lock, and the nauseating sound of light-hearted conversation. Lights went on in adjacent rooms.

Mary held Rusty tightly against the back door in the half-lighted kitchen. “Did you mean it?”

“Mean what? Let me go! C’mon Mare, let’s get out of here!”

“Mean what you said about letting me cry?” She felt Rusty’s fear building.

“Whatever it takes Mare! I’ll do whatever it takes!”

That could have meant many things, but Mary put it where she wanted it and that was enough for her.

A husband walked into his kitchen, turned on the light. The back door was open and an empty black sack draped the threshold.

He turned to his wife and said, “We were robbed.”