07/08/2020, 17:38
Fandom: -
Summary: for a prompt on Dreuzels, title stolen from John Milton
Words: 746
I laugh, and realise immediately I am probably a horrible person. I’m sure Mrs Mary Goodwin, my neighbour, thinks so anyway. Our paths cross every morning as I make my way to work. She glances downwards and huddles her children past me, and I just know.
She doesn’t seem to grasp how different our lives are, how different we are. She is nothing short of thrilled about being the happy housewife. Sure, she’s got a job, but she’s also got two very nice little rosy-cheeked kids, and not to mention a husband whose eyesight is way too crappy to go to war. For the first time I’m glad I don’t have any kids. Any kid of mine would be cursed with the same stares I get. The stares for the woman who is sleeping with an officer while her husband is off to war. In his own home. Surely, there can’t be any excuse to do something so horrible.
Perhaps there can’t be. Perhaps there isn’t. Perhaps this is why I can’t sleep at night, why I lie awake and turn over again and again, contemplating the furniture and especially that horrible lamp my father-in-law gave me and Daniel for our anniversary. I am in the fault, after all. I am unfaithful. I know he has never slept with another woman. Not because he loves me – such silly notions were left behind on the altar – but because he lacks the imagination, possibly the courage. He has this orthodox sense of morality, and even if he’d ever found out about this, about me, about the man breathing unbearably loudly in his bed, he’d probably forgive me in the end. He always does. He’s a forgiving and loving husband, and I’m the free-spirited social butterfly. I need to be corrected, my skirts need to be longer, my back needs to be straighter, and I certainly shouldn’t want as much independence as I do. As I have. I shouldn’t have a job while he got fired. I shouldn’t take the car every day. It isn’t mine.
Now that he’s gone, it is. The morning he left, I took it out and drove all the way to Dover, just because I could. He wasn’t stopping me. If I wanted to, I could take the car out again tomorrow, and the day after. I could go to the lake and dive into the deep. I could do it naked, in the middle of the night, my hair loose, dancing in the light of the full moon. My only obligation is my job at the MTC. It’s much better than factory work, and I’m actually able to do the thing I love most, and the thing my husband disapproves of most, for a reasonable salary: driving.
Next to me, under the sheets, a body stirs.
“Cathy?”
Andrew likes to pronounce my name that way. My husband always calls me Cath, or Catherine when he’s angry. So does my father. As long as Andrew doesn’t, it’s all fine. Cathy isn’t who my husband will return to, if he will ever return. Cathy is different, she’s elsewhere. She is the woman I have put away for years, stuffed into the back of the closet between the boxes in which I stored my childhood. She’s the woman who occasionally tells Daniel that I want a life, and that I do not simply exist to cook him dinner and iron his clothes. She is the bird let out of a cage, and when this all is over, she’ll be stuffed back in. When my husband returns, everything will go back to normal. Mary’s stares will make sure of that, as does the wedding ring Andy never bothers to take off.
He whispers my name again, and I answer him with a soft kiss on his stubble. More and more often I find myself wishing that the war will never find its end – or worse, that my husband will.
Summary: for a prompt on Dreuzels, title stolen from John Milton
Words: 746
What hath night to do with sleep?
When I look sideways, I see the same closet I have seen for eleven years. Nothing has changed since the start of my marriage. The curtains, the carpet. They bear the marks of time, but nothing more. I can almost feel his gentle breathing on my skin, and the presence of another human being is leaving its mark – if not on the room, then at least on me. For the first time in those eleven years, I feel as if I may never have to be alone again.I laugh, and realise immediately I am probably a horrible person. I’m sure Mrs Mary Goodwin, my neighbour, thinks so anyway. Our paths cross every morning as I make my way to work. She glances downwards and huddles her children past me, and I just know.
She doesn’t seem to grasp how different our lives are, how different we are. She is nothing short of thrilled about being the happy housewife. Sure, she’s got a job, but she’s also got two very nice little rosy-cheeked kids, and not to mention a husband whose eyesight is way too crappy to go to war. For the first time I’m glad I don’t have any kids. Any kid of mine would be cursed with the same stares I get. The stares for the woman who is sleeping with an officer while her husband is off to war. In his own home. Surely, there can’t be any excuse to do something so horrible.
Perhaps there can’t be. Perhaps there isn’t. Perhaps this is why I can’t sleep at night, why I lie awake and turn over again and again, contemplating the furniture and especially that horrible lamp my father-in-law gave me and Daniel for our anniversary. I am in the fault, after all. I am unfaithful. I know he has never slept with another woman. Not because he loves me – such silly notions were left behind on the altar – but because he lacks the imagination, possibly the courage. He has this orthodox sense of morality, and even if he’d ever found out about this, about me, about the man breathing unbearably loudly in his bed, he’d probably forgive me in the end. He always does. He’s a forgiving and loving husband, and I’m the free-spirited social butterfly. I need to be corrected, my skirts need to be longer, my back needs to be straighter, and I certainly shouldn’t want as much independence as I do. As I have. I shouldn’t have a job while he got fired. I shouldn’t take the car every day. It isn’t mine.
Now that he’s gone, it is. The morning he left, I took it out and drove all the way to Dover, just because I could. He wasn’t stopping me. If I wanted to, I could take the car out again tomorrow, and the day after. I could go to the lake and dive into the deep. I could do it naked, in the middle of the night, my hair loose, dancing in the light of the full moon. My only obligation is my job at the MTC. It’s much better than factory work, and I’m actually able to do the thing I love most, and the thing my husband disapproves of most, for a reasonable salary: driving.
Next to me, under the sheets, a body stirs.
“Cathy?”
Andrew likes to pronounce my name that way. My husband always calls me Cath, or Catherine when he’s angry. So does my father. As long as Andrew doesn’t, it’s all fine. Cathy isn’t who my husband will return to, if he will ever return. Cathy is different, she’s elsewhere. She is the woman I have put away for years, stuffed into the back of the closet between the boxes in which I stored my childhood. She’s the woman who occasionally tells Daniel that I want a life, and that I do not simply exist to cook him dinner and iron his clothes. She is the bird let out of a cage, and when this all is over, she’ll be stuffed back in. When my husband returns, everything will go back to normal. Mary’s stares will make sure of that, as does the wedding ring Andy never bothers to take off.
He whispers my name again, and I answer him with a soft kiss on his stubble. More and more often I find myself wishing that the war will never find its end – or worse, that my husband will.
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