A Novel Approach - Intervention the Novel, FIRST DRAFT, please feel free to give feedback.

Before being snagged into married life he had always been Richard, not Dick.  It wasn’t until he met his wife Jane that he had been renamed.  The renaming had happened almost moments after he met her.  Even now he wasn’t sure how she had done it so easily, but then that was her stock and trade, a sort of therapeutic terrorism that remains undetected until everything turns into a blinding surprise that suggests suicide as either a motive or a solution.

Richard reveled in personal rebellion as he let the smoke alternate between rising from his lips and somehow settling around his head.  He wasted a moment evaluating how she even managed to control the air in the house.  The smoke was pushed down and directed about the room by the hyper efficient air management that Jane has insisted on having installed.  The system had been expensive as hell and he bitched for a profunctory moment before once again assenting to her wishes as he always did.

He inhaled the floating smoke like he was double dog daring the fumes to infiltrate his lungs.  Infiltrate.  That was a good word for it.  No, not a good word; the best word for what his wife, Jane had done to his life.  The combination of the renewing his relationship with smoke and waiting for his wife motivated Richard’s gurgling gut to twist away at his resolve to stand up to her.  Like so many at a moment of crisis, he chose to review all the ways his antagonist had poisoned his life.  He expected that he really needed the rage to make him finally, after all these years, whip up the anger he would need to put this marriage to death.

The smoke and nicotine made his vision float in and out of focus.  Suddenly his head snapped as if charged with electricity.  The hairs on the back of his neck bristled and the eerie feeling that he was being watched crept over his skin and amped up his nervous system.   His instincts, having really only failed him on the selection of his wife, forced him out of his seat.  His eyes scanned the windows.  There was nothing telling except the shadows from lazy tree branches bending to the wind outside the house.  Still, he couldn’t resist the urge to investigate.  Feeling some unbidden call to appear casual, Richard strolled to the window trying to look like he was inspecting the weather.  To solidify the façade of casual movement, Richard glanced up to the barely existent clouds that refused to threaten rain but did seem to be considering graying the late afternoon skies.  In that moment of wind watching Richard barely missed the ducking head that cringed back into the landscaping bushes that spent their days skirting the older growth trees. Unknowingly Richard and the person who melted into the leaves shared the question of it the shadows held death today.