Kind of Woman
As I continue to explore what my novel project is about, I find myself writing small snippets of “flash fiction” like this. It feels like I’m looking at a blank canvas and I’m walking around it in a circle. These writing Exercises are what Neil Gaiman calls “throwing mud at the wall.” He says it takes a long time to start clearing everything away to see the shape of what’s underneath. I haven’t gotten to that part yet, I’ll let you know when I do, though.
For now, here’s a splatter:
She was the kind of woman who stayed in miserable relationships.
It had always been maddening to all of her friends.
They couldn’t quite understand how or why she kept doing it- making herself small, living a half life, despair spelled out across her face.
The truth was, the alternative was always too scary- the unknown vastness of change. If she was going to suffer, at least she would suffer well. Make it look good, you know?
The last husband could have been worse by her previous benchmarks, for sure. This one didn’t beat her, didn’t put his cock in her mouth first thing upon waking, didn’t drug her and tie her to the chair. No, this one just worked too much.
It was a common problem of the 21st century (her other husbands having been raised by savages themselves, men of the 18th and 19 centuries who were given a code of conduct that no one questioned but everyone hated), and if that was all, well, fine by her. She could manage the house alone. She’d spent all of her twelve lifetimes before this doing just that. She was well adept at birthing and feeding and clothing and educating her children (at least this lifetime she didn’t have to bury any of them after winter). She could get them on and off the bus, no problem. So what if he traveled all the time? So what if he may or may not cheat on her? At least she still had the ring on her finger. At least she still had her garden.
O, the garden. Her one happy place in this godforsaken world.
It brought her back to herself every time.
Even when the tomato vines wilted and the flowers had all gone to seed, still, she loved it. She loved the way it made her hands feel, to pull the weeds in summer and rip her work by the root in autumn. The perpetual dirt beneath her fingernails reminded her of a time long gone, but still so viscerally inside of her. She could only remember snippets of all those lives before this one, they came in flashes when she bit into the first cucumber of the season or while kneading her bread at sunrise. The potent mix of mucus and blood that smeared the heads of each of her babies reminded her of all the babies she’d birthed before this one, and for a moment the pain of every childbirth was a portal.
She couldn’t keep going on like that, not this time. Every woman has a breaking point- I would know.
She found me shortly before her forty- fifth birthday. I had been in plain sight all along.
When she turned the lens upon herself and set the timer, she felt a rush of what was coming, and for a moment, paused. It was in the millisecond between decision and doubt that my shutter opened to take in her face.
O, that face. The rounded edges, the soft eyes, the drooping skin along her mouth. I took it all in, as she knew I would. I opened my eye and for the first first time she was seen and known and completely and utterly transported back into all the versions of herself she had been and I smiled for I knew that this would be the greatest gift of all.
It’s true what they say- a picture is worth a thousand words.
And hers?
Well.
I left her speechless.
I took all the words she’d never said and I let them kill her.
Her body was never found.
