The Sunday Whirl Submission: One Moment in One Day

One Moment in One Day

She sits on the bed, looking through herself in the dresser mirror. She can see in the reflection the building chaos peeking from the dustruffle. There is a bottle still half full of coagulated, useless breastmilk. She thinks "I should feel something. Some thread of something." Yet, there was only a vast deep emptyness, a rut where her soul should be. Still not seeing herself, she looks in the mirror and knows that she should get up, bathe, cry, eat, do something, do anything, but mostly move. That doesn't happen.

Outside of this room, outside of this house, people court life. They go to work and complain about their jobs. They eat out and worry about their weight. They play ball with their kids and allow the sun to witness. They fuck and they make love. They laugh and they cry. There is an evershrinking number of them who think about this woman.

There is one man who does think about her. He journeys from the house into the open world and still lives a life. It is a dry, lonely, confusing life. He answers "fine" to the incidental "how are you?" He knows that he lies, and you know too, but, what are you supposed to do?

There are terms that describe what is going on. Terms as sad and tragic as dying coral and just as baffling. And, as we watch this sad tableau searching for the tiniest wisp of happiness, not seeing the plumes, there is a small guilty relief that it is not us.

And me, writing this sad story? I want to rewrite and make it all better. Think of something genius to help this family that I am overidentifying with, but that ending is not in me. Not that this is a rare occurance, often these things run away from me.

Maybe I can save them tomorrow.

heidi
written 02/11/13 for Wordle 95 of The Sunday Whirl .

This is my first attempt at this prompt, which I found through Whimseygizmo's Blog. Each week there is a word bank posted and you write using some or all of those words. I have been wanting to write more prose lately, and have had a heck of a time doing it. So, I used this opportunity to exercise those muscles. I also want to write something funny, but obviously did not do that today.  This week's words were: bathe, term, court, open, bottle, dry, coral, ball, plume, rare, incident, and thread. You can click on the links above for both blogs that I have mentioned here. Thanks to Brenda for the post and the opportunity. I look forward to next Sunday (and maybe something funny.)