You know I pick these prompts out randomly and just sort of plonk them into the calendar, but this weeks do seem sort of darkly themed. Hmm, unplanned, but let’s see where this takes us.
I rather like the dishes.
Tuesday, October 29th: The scars ran deep.
The scars ran deep. She didn’t know if they could ever be eradicated. She managed to control her anger, face it, deal with it and set it aside. At least she thought she had. She no longer considered herself angry. She didn’t feel angry all the time and if there were certain parts of her past that she didn’t think about in order to remain not angry all the time then that was fine.
There was no rule that said you had to dwell on the wounds of your past. If you could let them go, she thought it was good to let them go.
She thought she had.
Then came the call. She listened and said all the right things, her calm professional voice locked in place. The call ended and she set the phone down. She then gathered all her plates from the kitchen and went into the garage. She closed the garage door and picked up the first plate from the stack. She hurled it to the concrete and felt satisfaction when it shattered into a million pieces. One by one she hurled the plates down. When the stack was gone she went back for the smaller plates, then the bowls and then the cups. When she had a small mound of shattered glassware, she was breathing heavily and felt oddly calm, the brief spate of uncontrollable rage gone, worn away.
She was certain that a psychiatrist might have something to say about her methods but she didn’t harm herself or others with her brief spurt of violence and she could now think clearly. The last dregs of her anger were gone. She felt, even though she doubted she would tell anyone, that her anger fell out of the cracks as the plates smashed.
She thought of it like the cookies her grandmother used to make. She always broke them in half before eating and claimed the calories fell out of the crack when she broke it. She felt that way with her anger. She put it in the plates and when they smashed her anger drained out as well.
She moved to get the broom and dustpan, sweeping up all of the chards and double bagging them before putting them in the garbage bin. There was no reason for the garbage collectors to get sliced on the remnants of her anger. All was tidy once again. Safe and sound.
She left the house and went to one of the large scale stores in the shopping strip not too far away. She purchased a set of replacement plates that looked nearly identical to the smashed ones and took them back to the house. The plates, cups and saucers were unboxed and put on the shelf, the box and wrapping went to join the broken bits in the trash.
She took a deep breath. Her world was back to normal. At least outwardly. She looked at the phone. She left it on the charger when she picked up the plates. It was fully charged so she un plugged it. As she did, she wondered how they got her number.
She wasn’t hiding, but she didn’t have much contact with anyone from her past. She went to the funeral and after probate separated herself. She untangled the strings binding her to her husband’s family slowly and deliberately. There was no sudden cutting of ties, just a slow drift. When there were no more visits, no reasons for involvement, she moved. She took a new job and got a new house in a new city. The old house had been the last connection.
‘We’ll next to last connection,’ she thought. Once she settled, she got a new phone number to match the new city.
Ten til Midnight 