The apartment had been empty, except for Lucy, for so long that she had lost track of the months. She sat watching the light rise through the bedroom window and set over the kitchen sink for days at a time, no sleeping. She couldn't bother trying to stomach the last packet of crackers lying just outside her reach on the hardwood floor. Her hunger had left her not long after Thomas and their little boy. Unfit. Unfit, that's what they called her. Physically, sure, but for motherhood? Whose right was it to tell a woman that? One who had carried another human life to fruition, pushed it forth from her own flesh. She had fed it from her own swollen breasts. Until she couldn't anymore. Love is strong, and love for a child, she discovered, was unimaginable until one had felt it for a child of their own. His eyes were windows to her own soul.
Yes the love was strong, terrifyingly so. But as it goes, addiction can be stronger in a woman like Lucy. And so she fell. Back into a hole that had engulfed her time and again throughout her life. And in the darkness of that hole, she couldn't see him anymore. She could barely even hear his cry, piercing as it was. It was always there, distant and needy. Until one day it wasn't anymore. And the hands pulling her out of the depths were less than gentle. Thomas had come back, and after seeing them both on the floor, broken and cold, he left again. This time with the baby. How she missed his scream, the only thing teathering her to reality. She fell deeper, and then she too was gone. She feared this time for good. She was a rag doll, shredded, left strung across the arm of a tattered chair. Were she not so empty of substance, her face would be stained with pain and tears. She kept her eyes open when she could, staring down at what was left of herself: A lonely shadow slithering across a dirty wooden floor, in the sunlight that kept on passing from the sill of the bedroom window, setting somewhere in the kitchen sink.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorChicago-born citizen of the globe, rich in the things that really matter. Let's get weird. Categories
All
Archives
January 2019
|