One evening, my wife shed her marigolds and decided she’d had enough.
“I can’t do it anymore,” she said. “I won’t.”
I pitied her. She wasn’t a natural housewife. Black armbands, formed of oven grease, encircled her elbows. Guiding her to the sink, I rinsed away the grimy oases pooling in the folds of her skin.
“You rest. I’ll put the kettle on,” I said. I led her to the table and sat her down. “Don’t stress. I bet your mum’ll be willing to lend a hand.”
“It was my fault.”
I placed her mug down on the counter and turned. She faced a photo hanging on the wall: the one with the layer of dust atop its gilded frame—a blight on our otherwise spotless home, best ignored. Jamie. Her face a shriveled peach; her planet-sized eyes glittering with unfulfilled mischief. We’d agreed she couldn’t be replaced. We’d never make another like her.
“What do you mean?” I said.
I waited. The kettle rumbled, like the onset of a distant tsunami.
“She was blue when I reached the cot,” she said. “It may have been too late by then, but I didn’t check. I pretended I hadn’t seen. I left her there for ten minutes before I called the ambulance.”
She squeezed her palms together, her eyes brimming. Behind her, a spider tightroped across a cobweb spanning the length of the curtain rail. Funny how a man can see the same four corners every day and not notice the intricate details of the space he inhabits.
“You were never there,” she said. “Everything rested on me—it was too much.”
I crossed the room and reached for the paperweight from the end table. Jamie—frozen, immaculate—watched me through her neglected frame. I stared at the center of my wife’s crown—at the same point where the soft spot on our daughter’s skull would never fuse—and raised the paperweight above my head. She sat paralysed, like prey, and closed her eyes.
The kettle clicked. I lowered my shaking arm, and turned my back on both of them.
Verity McKay is a teacher by day and a fiction writer by night. She loves animals, kickboxing and reading as many books as she can get her hands on. This is her first published story.