At first Martin didn’t bother looking up at the approaching vehicle. His attention remained focused on the blood dripping from the rock pick clenched in his right hand. The drops seemed to sizzle as they hit the asphalt. The urge to place his ear to the middle of the farm-to-market road and listen to Lucy’s blood almost overwhelmed him. Propriety kept him off his arthritic knees and trudging towards his car.

The sun owned Texas in August. Even without the recent exertion he would still be bathed in sweat. Rivulets ran along the careworn lines of his face.

Martin turned towards the road and watched as the car drove past. He could clearly see the two middle-aged women in the front seat. They appeared to be discussing him. No, not discussing – yammering. Yammering the way Lucy had yammered for the past thirty years.

His accountant’s brain filed away the license plate number of the car and he thought back to the day he met Lucy. She’d entered his life as a young widow with a simple tax problem – easily fixed.  It should have taken him less than half an hour to explain the solution.  Two hours after sitting down in front of his desk, she still yammered away.  About her taxes.  About her husband being killed in a car accident.  About living with her parents, Charlie and Amanda.  About her Siamese cat, BoBo.  About the color of the car she hoped to buy.  Every new topic revolved around her.  Martin tuned out everything but the tax issues.

Lucy kept crossing and uncrossing long, tanned legs.  She wore platform sandals and the polish on her toenails matched her pink lipstick.   The swell of her breasts beneath the floral halter mini-dress captivated him.   Despite her non-stop talking, he found himself desiring to nibble on her plump lips.

Martin shocked himself by doing something he’d never before done with a client – he asked her to join him for dinner that evening.  At six o’clock to the minute he knocked once on the  front door to her parents’ house and before raising his fist for a second knock, it swung open.  Her father stood in the doorway.  He introduced himself and offered Martin a beer.  They chatted while waiting for Lucy.  The older man seemed nervous.  Jittery.

Martin glanced at the staircase as the sound of Lucy’s voice drifted down.  Never looking up, Charlie picked at the label on the beer bottle in his hand.    Amanda came down the staircase first, with Lucy trailing behind her and talking to the back of her mother’s drab brown dress.  The frail woman brushed a straggling strand of gray hair back from her forehead.  She gave Martin a wan smile, but said nothing.  Lucy kept talking.

Martin looked back as they left for dinner and caught Lucy’s parents exchanging a look which kept him wondering for years.  Hope mingled with what?  Disappointment?  Fear?

Over time Martin discovered his desire for Lucy’s physical charms could only be sustained if he stilled her voice with constant kisses.  His lips bruised and swollen, he soon tired of the effort it took to not only shut her up, but to feign any interest in intimacy.

At the age of thirty-nine, the fear of being alone overcame common sense.  The happiest couple at the wedding were the bride’s parents.  Weeks after the nuptials they moved to another state, telling Lucy her father received a job offer too lucrative to turn down. They claimed they’d miss her.  They never called.

Martin soon discovered worse things than loneliness. Lucy fluttered, hovered, fussed and smothered with her overpowering love. She had no friends or family nearby to blunt her interminable yammering.  Martin could barely tolerate the constant attention and since his retirement two years earlier, he felt trapped in Hell’s echo chamber.

One day a week he would escape to go fossil hunting. Despite a life spent sitting behind a desk, he maintained a wiry frame and muscular arms by tramping through the hills and swinging his rock pick into the Cretaceous rocks. The simple activity brought him a few hours of peace. Lucy had begged him for years to take her and today he gave in to the yammering.

She trailed behind him offering opinions on everything from the direction they should be walking to why he should take up a weekend hobby that didn’t involve getting hot and sweaty.

A dust devil formed yards from where they stood.  Transfixed, Martin watched as dust, leaves, twigs and small pebbles whirled upward in a tight spiral. It dissipated as suddenly as it appeared, leaving no evidence it had ever existed.

Lucy didn’t see it and Martin realized she didn’t see him.  She had never seen him – not once in all the years they’d been married.  Her words were a blind and uncaring maelstrom swirling around him, pummeling him with their relentless force.  Sucking him under.  Killing him.  He looked at Lucy, who had begged to go fossil hunting with him.

His thoughts returned to the present.  A grim smile touched his lips as he considered the possibility that in the distant future, some amateur rockhound might discover an unexpected fossil in a tiny cave in the Texas Hill Country.

Martin glanced at his t-shirt, where sweat had begun to turn the angry red splotches to deep salmon-colored blurs. He then looked down the length of deserted road. His grip on the rock pick tightened and he wondered if the husbands of the women in the car ever felt trapped.

* * *

“Look at that old geezer. I bet he took that hammer thingie and bashed his wife’s brains in. Her body is probably up there behind that ridge right this minute,” said the dark-haired woman in the passenger seat of the green sedan.

Dori lifted her foot from the accelerator and glanced at the man on the shoulder of the road. “Where do you get those stupid ideas, Kathy? That’s just some man who’s been looking for fossils. I think the thingie is called a rock hammer or something like that. You don’t know much about paleontology, do you?”

From behind dark-framed glasses, Kathy eyed her attractive blonde cousin and grinned. “You don’t know much about murder. Besides, you’ve been teaching first grade for nearly thirty years and I’m pretty sure the curriculum doesn’t include paleontology.”

Dori rolled her eyes. “The guy didn’t murder his wife. He’s old and harmless and you need to grow up.”

Kathy laughed. “Your story is boring.  I like mine better."