Monday leans into mercy. Tuesday is tender enough for tears.
It’s Wednesday. Beth is lying on a prickly blanket of grass. Her eyes are closed and her phone is positioned mere millimetres from her earlobe. She has a meringuesque section of hair above her left temple that makes her feel like her life should be slowing down. Her facial muscles have ironed themselves into a frown.
Beth is the bird who forsook its nest for the semblance of a monster. The difference is now she is no longer willing to be prey. She relives the night his hands embossed her throat, the stricture of the surrender. She does not yearn as she once did for the contour of his feathers to mesh with hers, to make her matter. She collects her fallen feathers and converts them into quills. Her words soar with deft precision occupying the spaces he once translated into silence.
It’s hard to make shards of all the memories though, to sift through the rubble is to decide to keep some of it, some of him. The way his fingers used to splay to give a slanted view of the surprise he had prepared for her. His voice soft and seductive on her neck. Her hands tremulous with the need and want of him.
‘We’ve found you a shelter, it’s a great spot just thirty minutes from here’ the woman’s voice feels like a warm cup of tea that has spilled across a table and is now rushing and splashing off the sides. She thinks of him in the grisly squalor of their apartment as something like sincerity strikes him. Will he lapse into candour or push on through to his blight risk? How will he react when he realises she’s the sole survivor of this disaster?
