I find that when I get angry, I need things to be in their places. Does that make sense? For instance, if my favorite show has been cancelled, I’ll curse some and maybe I’ll throw the remote across the room or something. Then I’ll notice that there happens to be this can of soda sitting on the coffee table without a coaster. That soda-it should be on the coaster. There’s no way around it. Everyone should know to use a coaster. Hypothetically speaking, I’ll lose it. Every little indiscretion that this can has made becomes the biggest insult, and I will not rest until everything is the way I want it to be. I want that can gone, and, in whatever way I can, I will make it go away.

My wife-it was the worst for her. We’ve always had this problem: I like to keep ketchup in the fridge, but she wants to leave it out on the table. That’s what they do in restaurants, she says, but I tell her to look at the goddamn label. Anne, I tell her, Anne, if the company says to refrigerate the damned bottle, just shove it in the goddamn fridge already!

I came home from work one day and I was tired, I was hungry. As I was walking through to the kitchen I passed by the dining room table. What did I see? The goddamn ketchup was out, sitting between the salt and the pepper. For a minute I didn’t know what I wanted to do-call Anne and yell at her, throw the bottle across the room, or stick the thing back in the fridge and be real passive about it. In the end I chilled out and chose the latter. With as much calm as I could muster I walked into the kitchen and stuck that warm, red bottle in the door, next to the mustard.

I was still hungry, so I turned on the stove, filled a big gaping pot with water, and brought it to a boil. Now, me, I like long spaghetti noodles, but Anne only buys this baby shell pasta. The stupid little shells, they kept leaping out of the packet and spilling all over the counter. I would accidentally crush them every time I picked one up to put it in the pot. It was annoying, you know, because weird crushed bits of pasta never cook, they just float around on the surface of the water. So I got a spoon out. I started trying to fish the damned broken pieces out, but when my spoon broke the skin of the water the bits moved and sloshed water over the side. And it pisses me off, you know? I was still trying to get them out, and I threw the spoon down in the pot, and all that boiling water? It splashed me in the face. I was hollering pretty loud, but I had enough common sense to run over to the sink and put my face under cold water-which hurts, by the way-and it was then that my wife came in.

She was carrying the groceries in and she had the dog on a leash and she was laughing at me. My face was under the sink, I had these red welts coming up all over my skin, and she was laughing at me. What did you do, she asked. Pasta water, and I said it through gritted teeth because I was already pissed, very pissed off. She kept laughing, kept making fun of me because, apparently, I couldn’t cook pasta. I told her, I had a hard day and I didn’t need her shit. Her Dalmatian was wagging away near my feet, and I wanted to kick it because it was in the wrong place. But, I mean, I was holding back, I’m not a cruel guy, so I wasn’t going to kick a dog. So I turned back to the stove and started moving the pan around on the burner.

We have one of those flattop burners. It’s basically ceramic, doesn’t have an exposed heating element, so it has circles to show you where to put the pots or pans or whatever. I moved the pot around instead of, you know, hurting the dog. I figured, maybe if I just concentrated on putting the pot directly in the middle of that ring, I would calm down. But it didn’t fit. The pot was too big, too damn big. So I tried moving it to the front burner. I turned that one on, felt it heating up. My wife was just standing there, giggling stupidly and petting the dog. I really couldn’t stand the panting noise the dog was making, so I said, Anne, will you please remove that damn animal. Just take it away. But Anne said no, why would she do that, the dog is fine where she is. And I was fiddling with the pot, I had hold of the handles and I was just moving it, back and forth, water climbing up the sides every time the movement changed direction. Anne asked me what I was doing. She said that sloshing the water around wasn’t going to make it cook any faster.

And here is where I start to have problems with my memory: see, I don’t remember moving. Maybe I recall gripping the handles harder, maybe the dog’s claws scrabbling around with no purchase on the wooden floor, but I don’t remember moving. There is this one thing, though, that comes back to me, and that is the sound of water hitting her face, and this little hissing noise when the pasta shells met and fused with her hot, wet skin. Then there was this clatter, which I think was me dropping the pot, and this thud, which I think was my wife hitting the floor. Cause I didn’t see it, you know, just heard it. People say you see red when you’re mad, but I didn’t see anything.