togetherness

unwomanly-deactivated20201108

Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy feast and holy fast: the religious significance of food to medieval women

Arthur gave her a peculiar but intrigued look as they approached the car. The horizon of the cobblestone street wavered like a desert's mirage; its fluctuating, heat-induced illusions had painted their world with hallucinogenic verve. But no, there was no grand reveal, it was only more cobblestone met with the English humidity, and his modest car parked tightly between two SUVs.

He politely listened to her with the studious ears of an academic, her lecturing on blackcurrants and their complex flavor profile was riveting to say the least. It was times such as these that he felt fortunate knowing that they, as a pair, were so intellectually compatible. There was never a dull moment in their exchanges, and he found that the more he made a vow to silence, the many more revelations he made in regard to her character, which was as deep and mysterious as the Mariana Trench.

Just by looking, he could almost feel the harsh heat of the car’s surface—which had been sitting in a partially shaded area for the last hour. As it met with her skin, he wondered how it was that the back of her thighs were so immune to this pain despite their dermal composition being no different than any other human, skin so prone to a cutaneous scalding, what with them being as soft as they were.

“It goes beyond the pain of loss, Neeltje.” He replied, “Without sustenance, we wither away; it’s essential, it cannot be lived without. And as humans, we become starved; we will eat just about anything, even an unripe or rotting fruit, to escape the pains of hunger.” Arthur said, his knee parting her thighs ever so slightly as the frame of her legs were pressed against the hood further. “So perhaps it’s not that pleasure is unattainable without first experiencing pain, but rather, that the two are harmonious, and in a way, concurrent passions which mirror each other’s place in the human psyche. In addition to this, have you considered that pleasure may be heightened by pain—and that pain, in turn, becomes all the more acute in the presence of pleasure?”

He leaned into her, and by her decree, he opened his mouth and closed his lips around the delicate berry, which immediately crimped the masseter muscles of his face. It was the exact opposite profile of her ferric thumb, which in the crevices of his gums he could still detect this lingering earth-like grittiness. The commands were identical, but the consequences were diametrically opposed; this morning, she force fed him dirt, and now as the afternoon approaches, she graciously shared with him the fruit of gods. This action existed as the live performance to his philosophy.

“It was pleasurable, but not painless, not without the aftertaste of dirt. Now, open for me.” He said after he swallowed it, then cupped her small face with an open hand. With his other hand, he brought the pad of his thumb to press against the center of her chin, as if he bore the training of a dentist, and levered her mouth to unlock. With an open mouth, he kissed her and tasted the many lingering flavors of all that she had sampled at the market. He withdrew, his eyes one breath away from stellar death. “Can you taste the dirt?” He asked, preparing for the final propositum. “It made the flavor of the blackcurrant all the sweeter.”

They climbed into the car and were soon homeward bound. “I’m going to bore you with a story.” He lit them another pair of cigarettes, “I promise, it’s relevant— and I can’t control myself if I otherwise have nothing to distract me.” He said frankly, his eyes frequently checking his rear-side mirrors (he was a very rigid driver, and detested those who had no respect for the laws of the road). He cleared his throat as any true story-teller did before painting the opening scene.

“When I was about four years old, my brother Dylan and I had gotten lost in the wilderness that surrounded my family’s estate. It was sometime in the early autumn. Anyway,” He exhaled a stream of smoke, “We had been lost for most of the day, and were becoming convinced that we may never find our way back home. Mind you, I was only about four then, and I have very little recollection of any of this.

“So I was completely dependent on my older brother—who at the time must have been five or six—to make the decisions of a survivalist. Well, we happened upon a huge collection of shrubs, which were producing fat, black berries. They appeared to Dylan totally identical to the blackcurrants that all us children loved to eat in the springtime, and we were really quite hungry. So, you’ve probably guessed what happens next.

Before my brother had gotten his first taste, he was supposedly dissuaded by my reaction to its astringent taste. I collapsed within a minute of ingesting it, and of course his panic set in, and he began to scream and cry like any child might. So, you see, what we thought were blackcurrants were actually the berries of a deadly nightshade bush. Shortly thereafter—with God apparently watching over me—my parents located us with the aid of some officers, and I was rendered unconscious. My mother told me that my pupils were massive black orbs, and my breathing was severely shallow when I was found. Luckily, the antidote for a belladonna overdose is physostigmine, and I didn’t suffer any long-term effects… except that I grew up to be a neurotic kook.” He said this as a joke, “But this is the take away from the story: even as a child, I was drawn in by the deadly pleasures offered in life. I am almost a victim, but I can’t resist my own urges despite them resulting in my own suffering. It’s never left me, I think I am permanently poisoned to some extent.” The way he spoke were like the inky words that bled onto a damp canvas. He put his spare hand on her thigh, “My little belladonna.”

They arrived back home, and in came with them the armfuls of groceries. Everything appeared brighter, and the crabapple tree smiled at them as it peered in through the kitchen window; inside, a familiar scene unraveled. Two adults sorting groceries, brushing past each other in the limited space the kitchen had to offer. The spirit of togetherness was among them.

She absorbed his silence, her lips curving into a feline smile as she observed how his mind carefully annotated her earlier ramblings on blackcurrants. It was thrilling to be read so closely, as though she were a discovered manuscript whose margins he was constantly filling with notes. When her bare thighs met the scorching enamel of the car’s hood, the heat bit into her skin with localized violence. She did not flinch. Instead, she leaned back, arching her spine, letting her eyelids flutter half-shut as a barely audible breath escaped her lips - a private benediction where she could transfigure agony into adoration.

When his knee nudged her legs apart, bolting her against the hot steel, a shiver ran through her. She rested her hand gently on his chest, her touch light yet firm, her eyes heavy and dark as she seized upon his theory of suffering and delight: “Don't lecture me on it, make me feel it” she whispered, her voice a low velure against his skin. “You're an odd man, but I'm coming to find that such oddity arouses me.”

She took delight in knowing that deep within the crevices of his gums, the iron-rich sediment of the earth she had forced onto his tongue earlier was still grinding. He was carrying her soil inside his mouth like a communion. She was learning his liturgy fast, discovering the cruel luxury of submitting to a masterwork of her own making.

She parted her lips beneath his, inviting him with a pull – teasing him with the tannic burst of the fruit, the lingering grit of the soil, and the sun-warmed taste of her own heat.

“The dirt of the earth is the most purest form of man,” she murmured against his mouth, her fingers tracing the line of his neck, “I cannot taste it's sweetness for I am made for something far from fallen, it is why it taste so bitter to me.”

During the drive home, as the hypnotic click of the turn signals filled the car and he unraveled his childhood allegory of the nightshade berry, she remained still, her gaze fixed on him. She shifted subtly in the leather seat, resting her head against the cool window, her eyes tracking his move through a soft blue haze of cigarette smoke. He saw himself as a man pre-ordinated for ruin, infected early by a dangerous, forbidden taste he couldn’t unlearn and she wanted to let it linger more.

As he concluded his tale, resting his warm hand on her thigh, her response was deliberate. She slid her palm over his knuckles, her thumb gently tracing his skin in small circles, her nail grazing his wrist just enough to make his pulse jump. “Calling the nightshade a curse is just an excuse,” she purred, her voice dripping with dangerous warmth, "I’d willingly admit to craving a bite of something so virulent.”

For she was, in fact, a glutton. And for a glutton, the act of indulgence was an overbearing, insatiable hunger for more. Had she had been in his place as a child, she would have gladly died in the sweet grip of overindulgence, allowing her lack of self-governance to swallow her instinct of survival.

By the time they carried provisions inside, the kitchen was bathed in a pale, butter-yellow glow, like an old painting brought to life. It was depressing to see how empty Arthur’s utilities were – the lack of spices in the cabinets, the bleakness of a refrigerator holding nothing but cheap margarine, and how the saddening spectacle of a (former) bachelor who owned a single pan, one pot, and a dull, pitiful excuse for a kitchen knife.

Still, she made do with the little she had. She rolled out the pastry dough using a wine glass for a pin, the heavy crystal thumping rhythmically against the floured board, scattering a fine white dust over the counter like fallen frost.

While the crust baked, filling the small room with the rich perfume of toasted lard, she sliced a heel from a sourdough loaf. She spread a generous layer of salted butter over the soft crumb and turned to him. Closing the distance between them, she brought the bread to his lips, her thumb resting lightly on his chin, guiding him with an undeniable invitation.

“My mother loathed the very idea of food,” she murmured, a provocative smile playing on her lips as she watched him taste the butter. “She treats eating as insalubrious. And then she fell hopelessly, hypocritically in love with a chef. It is an excruciating irony! She would mock my father’s creations to his face with her words and then turn her scorn on me whenever she caught me eating.”

She turned back to the counter with a sway of her hips, cracking eggs into a glass bowl with precise, singular snaps, watching the bright yolks slip like liquid gold into the vessel.

“She expected her shame to make me starve, but her cruelty only fed my appetite,” she said, her hands pausing over the bowl as she turned slowly, her eyes heavy-lidded and fixing on him. “I remember the night of her forty-fifth birthday party. My father spent six hours preparing a slow-roasted galatine of pheasant, rich with port and truffles – the scent was to die for! My mother took one surgical bite and said it was nauseating, and pushed the plate away, leaving him to silence in front of the guest. So, I took the entire platter in front of them. I sat right at the center of the mahogany table, locked eyes with her, and devoured every decadent piece with my bare fingers. I let the fat drop onto her pristine linen napkin and it drove her wild.”

She paused, a lingering sigh escaping at the memory.

“Maxence tried to intervene. He leaned over and gripped my wrist so tightly his knuckles turned white, telling me to stop – begging me not to humiliate our mother and to spare myself the agony of what was to come. But I shook him off. I kept eating, long past fullness. My stomach stretched until it felt as though the muscles themselves would sear under pressure and my eyes would water. It hurt terribly. But every bite was pure ecstasy. I was suffocating on my own indulgence, and watching Maxence panic while my mother withered in disgust was the sweetest high in my life.”

She rested her hips against the counter, her gaze holding his with an effortless, coquettish charm.

“Out of pure spite, I became a glutton – taking every bite as an act of absolute defiance, seizing the joy of the feast precisely because it inflicted pain on her. I enjoyed it when she was upset, it proved she had no control over me. Though, I’ve come to realize that no one truly has control over me, have they? It’s almost disappointing, really.” She offered a soft, playful laugh.

“Knowing all this about me, I have to ask, because it has been bothering my heart for some time. Do you love me or have you've come to find me utterly disgusting?”

marypickfords

La nuit des traquées (Jean Rollin, 1980)

#nsfw #( aesthetic. )

He contributed his gaze to the conversation only at the behest of her downy articulation, and when they met, he could feel emerald moonbeams exfoliating its vulnerable light into the concave center of his chest; his yellowing heart, which felt preserved in cold formaldehyde, awoke with a reviving pulse, thus fawning over her. Had she forgiven him? It was impossible to know, for this at once magnanimous woman had the same capacity to act berserk at the smallest prompt.

The stare of this woman, which was currently gleaming with joy, was only a facade. Still behind the temporary gaiety was the vision from one hour ago; her eyes downcast, throwing a net of wickedness about him until he was entirely subdued. The moment was so nightmarish; his soul had escaped into a Hamlet-ish performance of raw vulnerability, and she had thoughtlessly pelted him with spoiled tomatoes.

Arthur subscribed to the thought that, perhaps with each visual taste he took of her, a piece of him was set ablaze by her fire; she was an electric green inferno, whose excited electrons only emitted its resplendent fluorescence in response to a very specific kind of nourishment, which seemed to accept two methods of love: his own servile way of navigating her affections, and then Holger’s ambivalent hatred disguised as love. How could one woman be so weak in another man’s world, yet so absolute in his?

In the parked car, Arthur impassively took a final drag of his cigarette before stamping it out into a porcelain ashtray, which was settled snugly in a cupholder. Beside him, a thousand words were being said by his wife, which all pertained to food, and he felt allayed by the normalcy. Finally, something predictable was coming from her mouth rather than the uncharitable opinions she secretly bore of him—those words that lingered like the trace evidence of a virus. He allowed himself to be swept up by the fantasy that his wife enjoyed his company as much as he did hers, but there was an ache that settled like sawdust in his stomach. This underlying feeling called doubt, insecurity, dread—and it marred every other happy thought that it touched.

Ciche, coq au vin, citronate to drink, cookies—and every ingredient used to cultivate such complicated recipes she listed… He could hardly keep up with the grocery haul she aspired to collect, and he cursed himself for not bringing a pen and paper.

“That sounds deli—”

“Well I—”

“I’ve never tried—”

His attempts to interject his own thoughts were bulldozed humorously by her zestful canto, but at the very least, he did manage to confirm that he did, in fact, like muddled mint. His wet eyes cherished her as each passing word crossed the border of her cushion-like lips, and eventually he lost interest in competing with her passions; the treasures that lay ahead at the farmer’s market were far too demanding of her attention, and any possibility that her ardent ranting may cease was unlikely. He could sit, just like this, and be subjected to her natural passionate state for many hours and feel perfectly fulfilled.

They evacuated the car and Arthur watched as his wife dove into the wavering lake of people, quite dumbfounded by her leopard-like pace. Luckily, his long legs aided him in catching up to her, and he trailed along her denim skirt like a sheep, who was otherwise guideless without the presence of their shepherd.

The pathways between vendors were narrow, and Arthur was becoming crowd averse the deeper they advanced. The excess of bodies was especially gruesome in the sultry June heat, for under the tarp it was intolerably warm and felt like the inner workings of a hot-air balloon. The cicadas’ screaming grew insufferably loud as the summer atmosphere became more dense. He was amused by Cornelia's contentment, which had become evident in the presence of others; with ease she could engage in conversation with perfect strangers despite the heat, which seemed to bother her very little. Was it a sense of community that pacified her, he wondered, or just the food that surrounded them from all angles?

Food was a true universal language, and a quote rang in his ears: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” This resonated, not because he agreed with its significance, but because it had him reconsidering how much of her instability was ascribable to her empty stomach. He had known her to be very fixed in a three-meal-a-day routine, and they failed to breakfast together that morning. Perhaps the blame was his own, having fallen short in keeping his pedigree kitten well-fed.

Still, dealing with her ever-changing emotions was entirely exhausting, and certainly this sort of energy could not be sustained in placating her; he wondered how realistic she felt it was to put upon him this encumbrance—was it meant to be easy as it was for the raindrops to roll off of a slick umbrella? But with this thought came the golden shimmer of empathy; if this was a difficult task for him, he could only imagine what her inner world was like.

As she was exchanging bills with the merchant who sold her the fresh fruit, there was a minor discomfort that festered in him; he came to realize this sprouted from all of her questioning about the produce (or alternatively, because her nipples were visible, just as frozen mountain peaks were). Since his youth, he had been trained to converse politely, yet he still found useless banter to be an odious labor. Because of his strong efforts to avoid being social with strangers, Cornelia’s natural affinity for extroversion always impressed him. They were so unalike from one another, and each passing moment was a reminder of this.

Just when a moment of fleeting, ignorant bliss washed over him, he was dragged back down by his memories of hell. He couldn’t put a stop to his endless recounting of her harsh words, and he began to criticize her privately for her lack of self-governance once again.

But then he watched her bite into the blackcurrant. Her dainty mouth puckered in such a way that melted into his bloodstream, and he found himself vicariously salivating when watching her eat the berry. A hot throb ambushed him at the sight. It was at her most effortless that he became completely undone by her. He noted the blood of its flesh exude through the parting line of her lips, and abruptly he felt the urge to put his whole tongue into her open mouth.

Were this appropriate, he certainly would have done so. But instead, he stood there puerilely, observing her with frustrated angst and saying nothing at all.

They left one vendor and leapt to another like frogs traveling by lilypad. Her tote bags were becoming heavy with goods, and he relieved her of the weight by securing the bag's loops into the anticubital space of his arm.

“You enjoyed those blackcurrants.” He finally broke his long hiatus of speech. They were almost certainly ripe, and Arthur felt that the springtime of their love had been bombarded with nothing but cold rain thus far. This was hugely disappointing, as he knew that fruit-bearing plants were at their most fertile in this season.

They rounded about the other side of the market, and there was little else to see. Arthur insisted on buying a bouquet of bleeding hearts and hellebores to lighten the mood in the house. They seemed to be making progress, their make-up slowly but surely drawing them closer to a happier evening.

Food was never merely sustenance -- never just the coarse grain of salt, the break of bread, or the barrow boiled from bone. It was an inventory of unspoken things: every quiet devotion she had harbored, every loss she had buried, and the precise weight of all she refused to name aloud. She handled the bruised skin of produce with a fragile reverence, the way one might cradle a wild, wounded bird whose heart palpitated against the palm.

It was as though the sunlit stalls had been constructed merely to cradle her passage. She drifted from merchant to merchant, pulling the crowd into her orbit with effortless magnetism. Vendors of every kind leaned across their wooden crates, breathlessly ensnared by the low rasp of her laughter, her heated praises over a handful of radiant legumes, and the trail of her fingertips across a plum’s flesh. She treated the earth’s yield like a sacred offering meant to be devoured. This woman gathered nature’s flawed, fleeting creations and offered them salvation inside the ideals of a meal.

Yet even the most immaculate, sun-warmed tomato could not pull her focus from Arthur. Through the humid shimmer of the crowd, under the heavy, oppressive glare of noon, her gaze instinctively locked onto Arthur. The sight made her blood run hot -- she thought of him as a beautiful captive being slowly colonized by a parasitic rot, invisible spores taking root in his frame, and sprouting beneath his skin until his body and will were no longer his own. A sharp shiver coiled in her abdomen, at the way he trailed her steps like a tethered hound. But the feeling curdled quickly into an aching guilt. An apology. She knew she should acknowledge her cruel actions towards him. But where does a person even begin - was I’m sorry even enough?

She accepted a sprig of sea beet from a vendor whose hands trembled violently as his eyes drank in her figure, despite her mind being a thousand miles away from the vendor's desperate affection. She slid the leaf between her lips, chewing with a sensual precision, her eyelids heavy. Too young. The young green carried a shallow, timid salt. She preferred the foliage of older leaves that had suffered enough in a season to grow thick, fleshy, and deeply, uncompromisingly bitter. How disappointing.

When Arthur’s voice broke the quiet, catching her off guard, her sheepish smile graced her lips, as her gaze swept over him with lazy intention.

“It was a heavenly experience” she purred, the words slipping out like a slow exhale, heavy with secret delight.

A charged silence lingered as they drifted further out of the market's main vein and into the shaded courtyard of a florist. Stalls overflowed with cut stems and damp earth. Cornelia accepted Arthur's fragrant bundle as long as she was able to take home tuberoses.

With her bundle tucked securely under one arm, they turned away from the market's hum and began the long walk back to the car. The sweltering afternoon sun beat down on the pavement.

"You didn't get a chance to enjoy a blackcurrant,” she murmured, as they halted in front of his vehicle, the back of her thighs pressing against the heated hood of his car. “Did you know there was a delicious cruelty to a blackcurran? It lures you with the promise of a sweet grape, only to strike your tongue with a sourness so sharp it catches in the back of your throat. It tricks you! I find I adore being teased like that…or perhaps, I simply adore the teasing.” She chuckled as her pink tongue briefly traced the edge of her lip leaving it stained like a crushed roses.

“You’re going to find me very stupid, if you have not already-” she admitted softly, glancing up through her lashes before her eyes drifted away, caught in a memory. “There is a painting I adore called Blackcurrant Pie.” A faint flush rose to her cheeks, a sudden delicate shame at admitting such a tender, niche obsession for an old still life. How boring! “I think I finally understood what the painter was trying to say,” she whispered, her gaze finding Arthur again. “You cannot truly appreciate pleasure until you’ve felt the pain of its loss.”

Her body leaning forward to dig for the wrapped treasure in the tote. Once entangled in her grasp, she pulled out the wooden punnet with her prized possession. She tilted her head, her heavy gaze dropping to his mouth as she extended her hand, her small delicate purple-stained fingers, offering the violet-slicked berry directly to him.

“Open for me,” she commanded softly, a playful gleam in her eyes. “Fruits like this do not stay this perfect for so long. You should enjoy it while it still bleeds pleasure.”

Her attempt to soften her tone did nothing to relieve the unrelenting sense of suspense that left him so perturbed. His eyes followed her up the stairs, and only when she shut the bathroom door could he feel his muscles retract into a calmer state. He allowed himself a couple of minutes to stand idly, purging his crowded mind of all that had just happened, subjecting himself to a re-run of the theatrical acts in slow motion.

While she basked in the luxury of a hot, soapy bath, he utilized the kitchen sink to rid himself of the outdoor grime. His clothes were discarded directly into the barren washing machine, and he regretfully washed his hair using the standby dish soap, watching the whirl of water become brown with dirt as it was fuzzled by a slow-draining pipe. A quick trip to his wardrobe and he looked perfectly renewed; a dobby-woven collared shirt, pleated trousers, and a pair of derby shoes. His hair was doomed to be soaked for sometime, and he was hesitant to ask for access to the blow drier.

Arthur returned downstairs and fell onto the divan with an unintended heaviness. He stared blankly at the wall, the only sound cutting through the ringing silence was the pitter-patter of rain that had dulled in a slow decrescendo. Once it had stopped completely, a ray of warm light drained in through the curtains, and a chorus of birds chirped maniacally. Arthur appeared as a cat soaking up its heat, though he was not so simple-minded to find any satisfaction in it. He was still very numb, a worse feeling than a lithium-induced hypoesthesia.

From his luggage, he heard an unending sequence of vibrations sounding. He peeled himself from his rotting position on the divan, and went to dissect the suitcase in its corner. Once he found his phone, he was appalled to see over eighty notifications lined up on his homescreen—most of which were from social media accounts he hardly engaged with. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter… it was all nonsense to him.

Apprehensively, he swiped up and a flood of tabloids immediately drew him into their intended chaos.

The Cookbook Conspiracy! Internet Speculation Swirls Around Surprise Collaboration –Blogger and professional chef Neeltje Peeters took the internet by storm with her celebrated recipes, candid trials and hilarious errors, and her personable baking videos. But with the promise of a new book release, fans began to notice frequent features of an unfamiliar character, spotted increasingly in the background of her livestreams. That man is Arthur Melbourne–British award winning author of horror novel The Taxidermist. (We haven’t heard of it either!) Melbourne’s profile on LinkedIn was found by Neeltje fans, where they discovered that he advertised himself as a freelance editor alongside past teaching experience at Oxford University. Fans conclude that this suggests that Neeltje is working closely with him to produce her highly anticipated cookbook. While Melbourne followers are left confused by his drastic switch from horror to home-cooking, Neeltje fans have expressed concern over Melbourne’s character. Online spectators posted on major platforms such as TikTok and Twitter that Melbourne was committed to Serenity Path Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Winchester, UK, for treatment back in 2012. The specific reason for his admission remains unknown but a mental health crisis is highly speculated. Given the dark nature of his most notable work, fans express concern for Neeltje as tensions rise following her sudden social media absence, and as a result, online conspiracies have been gaining popularity based on the information recovered. Mirror Weekly reached out to both Melbourne and Neeltje for a statement on the matter; we have not received any response.

With an immediate swipe of his thumb, he cleared his notifications and angrily threw the phone at the wall. His screen cracked clear in half. He smothered a pillow over his face as he made a pathetic attempt to self-sooth before Cornelia returned from her bath, but even screaming into its feathery void did nothing to ease his sudden influx of anxiety. Arthur felt victimized by such a deplorable stigma—it was a deep pain to be both misunderstood and vulnerable, totally exposed without any defense.

Her footsteps made a path from the bathroom to the bedroom above him. A deep breath in, and a heavy sigh out. He wore a mask of equanimity, but seeing Cornelia ascend down the staircase was a sight. She was fresh out of the bath, perfectly groomed, and when he had the opportunity to visually consume her in all her wholeness, he could hear the high pitched wheeze of his heart as it deflated.

“Of course.” He said, not daring to deny her anything. If she wanted to go to the market, then he would take her. Once inside of his car, they sat in silence as the sun poached the remnants of the sky’s tears from the windshield. The car bore a potent odor of hot leather and stale cigarettes, and a crackling radio played Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, which could barely be heard over the car’s droning engine.

“Do you want a cigarette?” He asked damply, taking out two and lighting them both in his mouth before gifting her one. They both could severely use one. With a swift reversal out from his property, they glided over the damp dirt road and into the thronged downtown marketplace.

A small sparked emerged in her chest the instant Arthur relented. It was a compliant surrender; a fragile truce to keep the peace, and she was fully aware how their stalemate had become. The air between them remained a heavy, suffocating fog, thick with the residue of the ugly words she spat earlier. He was cold and entirely closed off. Yet, one could not subsist on silence and bitterness; unlike Arthur, who would starve without a thought, Cornelia would simply wither without the supplement of life.

An unexpected spring entered her step as they walked to the car, though she kept her composure effortlessly intact. Switching moods so fast around him felt risky -- almost dangerous. Damning, really.

Sliding into the passenger seat, a sharp gasp escaped her lips as her thighs hit the scorching leather. She winced, shifting with a smooth, swift quickness, arching her back just enough to hover off the searing material while waiting for the AC to kick in.

“Yes,” her tone, quiet, to his offer.

Before he could pull away, her fingers danced over to steal the lit cigarette right from his lips. She pressed the filter to her own rosy lips, taking a confident drag. The smoky warmth hit her tongue, tasting bitter of rich tar, as she exalted a soft plume of silver into the trapped heat, a sigh escape her lips.

Seeking to drown out the oppressive silence in the cabin, her hand reached for the radio dial, twisting it until a station caught. But as the speakers crackled to life, the soulful, aching voice of Adele’s Chasing Pavements bled into the warm leather interior. The tender, raw melancholy of the music hit the air like a mirror held up to their fragile state. The lyrics cut too deep, laid their misery to bare, and an immediate prickle of discomfort washed over Cornelia’s skin. It was far too intimate, far too heavy for a car carrying two people pretending not to bleed.

Wincing slightly, her fingers darted back to the dial, swiftly clicking through static until she found an upbeat, instrumental jazz rhythm to mask the tension instead.

Her gaze drifted outward, watching the scenery blue into a fast-moving streak of greens and grays. Pressing her temple against the glass, she trailed a single fingertip along the outside of the window, tracing rainwater beads that darted and dissolved as the car sped up. A soft, melodic hum vibrated in her throat, a little tune born of careful breathing to reset her nerves.

Underneath her composed exterior, a familiar ache tugged at her heart. She hated how easily they turned to frost, hated the exhaustion of walking on eggshells. Was it selfish of her to want something as simple as lunch while their marriage felt so fractured? But as the car drew closer to the open-air market, the oppressive weight in her chest began to shift. A tiny, stubborn spark of life caught inside her. She couldn’t fix them today, but she could let the world back in. If anything could pull her out of the dark it was simple, beautiful food.

When the car parked, her quiet restraint finally began its subtle turn. The heavy air in the car hadn’t cleared, but she leaned toward him, her eyes bright and clear, letting a flicker of warmth soften her voice.

“Okay,” she said, her voice soft with quiet determination before her words caught momentum, spinning into a rhythmic pace. “I’m thinking a quiche for lunch and then coq au vin for dinner if the quiche isn’t enough – which, let’s be honest, it won’t be. But at least we’ll have the wine. Well…since you don’t drink, I suppose I shall simply have to be generous and drink it for both of us.” She paused, tilting her head as her thoughts darted ahead. “Since it’s warm out, I can pick up lemons and make you a proper citronnade. Do you like mint, though? I adore a crushed leaf or two in mine, but if it’s not to your taste, I won’t ruin yours with it.”

She drew a quick, breathless gasp, her mind fluttering through a flurry of non-negotiable necessities.

“Then, I’ll grab a crusty baguette and some creamy cheese for us to snack on later. Oh! I was thinking of making cookies! I refuse to finish a meal without a sweet treat afterwards – I won’t start compromising now,” she beamed, her eyes sparkling as she looked down at her tote and her nose crinkled at the delight of her mental menu. “Ah! I’ll need fresh thyme, cracked pepper, and if the universe is feeling merciful, actual fresh fruit. I heard blackcurrants are in season here! They are not fresh in Belgium, and it has been a total dream of mine to try one. They’re right in peak harvest…or, well, I am desperately hoping they are!”

She opened her purse to pull out a foldable tote bag (her so-called emergency bags), the crisp fabric rustling in her lap as her energy stirred into something brighter. “I have to find the fresh ones, or at least a proper jam. Imagine golden shortbread topped with a dollop of blackcurrant! It sounds delicious. You don’t have to follow me, by the way. I know I ramble with the vendors and I hope they understand me as my accent gets thick with excitement, but I simply cannot wait another second.”

She looked over and still saw the shadow resting over his face and knew she was offering an olive branch he wasn’t ready to take. But the momentum of the market was pulling her now. Without waiting for his answer, she unlatched the door and stepped out into the crisp air.

Her heels struck a confident pace against the wet cobblestone, the evaporating mist catching in the loose wisps of her hair. She moved effortlessly through the crowd, her senses slowly waking up to the earthy perfume of wet stone, the warm aroma of yeast drifting from a nearby baker, the bright pops of color from stacked produce! With every step away from the tense silence of the car, her spirits lifted another notch.

Then, her eyes caught a fruit stand, and her face lit up with a radiant focus.

There they were! Nestled in small, woven punnets, glistening under the light like clusters of polished gems -- fresh blackcurrants!

Her stride quickened, her pulse racing as the lingering anxiety of their argument finally began to dissolve into pure passion. She glided up to the counter, leaving over the wooden crates as the deep, wine-like aroma of ripe fruit rushed to meet her nose. “Were these picked today?” she said smoothly, her hands motioning toward the display with a dramatic flair, her accent rich and charming. “We don’t have these fresh where I’m from--you have no idea what a sight this is!”

The farmer chuckled at her magnetic enthusiasm and held out a plump, deep-purple berry for her to try. Cornelia took it delicately between her two fingers, feeling the taut, smooth skin vibrating with cool juice. She brought it to her lips and bit down.

Pop!

A burst of electric tartness flooded her mouth, immediately followed by a wave of syrupy sweetness that coated her tongue. The flavor was loud, wild, and intensely aromatic -- a sudden explosion of tannic bitterness!

Her breath hitched in her throat. She pressed her fingertips against her collarbone, her eyes widening in a rapturous shock as the taste blessed over her palate. “Oh my…” she murmured, a breathless, brilliant laugh escaping her lips. The perfection of it washed over her, completely sweeping away the cold residue of their morning fight. She felt alive, untethered, and wonderfully buoyant.

Cornelia was the hot and dense point that birthed both space and time. In a tiny fraction of a second, she had split reality wide open from almost nothing, rupturing and bending his world until she was seen in every atom, every particle, in the very air itself. She was the beginning and the end to his universe, yet she was infinite in concept.

His mouth made no attempts to resist her thumb’s invasion, and he quietly gagged on the ferrous flavors that coated his tongue, obediently tolerating the blatant maltreatment until clemency moved her to wean him from the fleshy pacifier. He was lost to a wistfulness at the peak of this suffering—only yesterday, his broad tongue laid out like a serpent’s against the pedals of nature’s most erotic, secret garden. Now, he was subjected to choking on her dirty thumb. His once longing gaze corroded, and his eyes became inhabited by the wounded tears of an animal kept in captivity, stripped of all the freedom it once knew, and mourning the lost hope that it may ever return to the open pasture.

No longer did he overload her with his trivial talk of philosophy, as the belittlement that stained her each word suggested a complete and total intolerance of his fanciful ideas surrounding love. The unfriendly detachment behind the veil of her eyes confirmed that her true, unspoken opinion was that his bizarre fascinations were government by a kakistocracy, and from the perspective of a misandrist looking down upon him—the caricature of a whipped man—she laughed from up above, with a foot that kept his face buried on the holy ground where she stood.

The abstraction of his grander tenet felt like a harsh dismissal, a blasphemous simplification that hurt him immensely. If not her, then who would care about his sensuous testaments? He was suddenly alone, ditched and left to die in this hole of complete solitude, one which he dug for himself in compliance to her commands. Her unexpurgated talk of destruction roused his cells awake, instilling the fear of a wrathful god which caused an earthquake-like shudder to consume his entire skeleton. It was a seizure, a total bodily submission to the pain every human on earth desperately avoided. Their marriage dissolved through the gaps of her girlish fingers, and something more sinister had emerged from its dimming light.

He once could see his future quite clearly; warm visions of himself and her sharing a home, creating pictorial memories belonging to a hand-crafted photo album, what with scrapbook trimmings and all the rest. This prospect eroded as Cornelia exposed it, seemingly without a second thought, into a fuming flame. A charred hole emerged from the center of the photograph and expanded its way to the square edges, until it was nothing but a whorl of smoke. The dream was illusory. This vow was made under false pretenses, he began to realize, and a panic jolted his heart with an electric bolt. Wake up!

Would this cruelty become contiguous, where every day brought a new, harsher form of labor that went unappreciated by his dissolute and increasingly laudatory mistress? Did he love her, or did he hate her? Suddenly, he didn’t know. He thought, perhaps, two things could be true.

“But Cornelia, my loyalty is so much more than what you see in the pointless marriages of today—the common and cheap practice of so-called ‘faithfulness’—what I have is a fealty to you, the woman who I adore fervently, who rules my entire world! You are the ultimate.” But he was silenced again. His words were empty to her, and to continue in his coercion was very futile now.

‘I love you’ had never sounded so baleful. These words that once brought such a strong comfort to him now filled him with an impotent anger, and he winced as she ran her intimidating fingers across his filthy face, bracing himself for an open handed strike which never came. The revelation he had was that this was not an open conversation—this was her oration, and his interjection would be like interrupting the rapture. His silence was non-negotiable, any argument instantly awarded with the death penalty.

By the end of her speech, he had been mutilated beyond recognition. The severance from his pride was a bloody, throbbing mess on the floor. His tears were running dry, and his sobbing had retreated back into his chest, for the pain had transcended these superficial symptoms of grief. Arthur had been successfully emasculated by her, and upon her commands to return her to their ‘home’ (which would now indefinitely be his barred cell), he frantically abided by her directives. He knelt, turning to present the broad saddle of his back to her, then hoisted her hips onto it with practiced ease. As Arthur rose to his feet, heavy clumps of clay-rich earth broke free from his knees and thudded back to the ground. He carried her back in complete silence like a well trained mule.

Once they returned to the house, the disasters laid unchanged on the kitchen floor. Rosemary’s cheap perfume could be just barely detected in the otherwise neutral air. Arthur lowered Cornelia down to her feet, and being too weak to look her in the eyes, he said “I’ll prepare a bath.”

He disappeared up the stairs without another word, and the gurgling pressure of an old faucet could be detected from the main level. Arthur’s hands, which were still shaking with dread, clumsily sifted through his bath accessories. The water ran hot with steam bellowing out the sides of the clawfoot tub. The task of preparing it properly for Cornelia was the only thought that controlled him, for he had been lessened to a mere servant. He poured in a generous amount of ivory suds, and laid out a clean set of towels. When he had gathered the nerve to face her once more, he stood dutifully in the corner of the room when addressing her.

“It’s ready.” He said in a broken voice.

Cornelia was a woman governed by sudden, breathtaking storms. Her wrath erupted without warning, unleashing words like lightning that pierced deeply into her target long before her conscious could ever hear the thunder. Only when the silence settled would she survey the wreckage and grasp the tragedy of her own nature – that in her urge to wound, she had effectively ruined the very serenity she sought. Yet, her pride held her captive. What had spilled from her lips was done, and she refused the humiliation of gluing up the broken pieces.

As Arthur carried her, her body rested against him with a fragile weightlessness. She pressed her cheek into the broad, warm expanse of his spine, the soft rhythm of her breathing and her muffled crying lost entirely to the damp weave of his shirt.

Arthur had awakened an uncharted landscape within her. She had always been quick to flash with anger, yet she had never known the urge to be so cruel to a soul she held dear. She could not comprehend the frustration he kindled inside her, and how he could render the air between them, yet her heart blindly retraced its steps to him. Had it been any other man on earth, she would have walked away without a backward glance. But with Arthur, her soul stubbornly doubled back, tethered by an inescapable pull. It maddened her that the one thing she could not master, that he could control, was her own desperate yearning for him.

When they arrived, the aftermath of her outburst rose up to greet her. Broken, ceramic shattered pieces lay strewn across the kitchen – the physical casualties of her temper. Once Arthur walked away to the dim quiet of the house, swallowing the knot in her throat, Cornelia dropped to her knees. She began picking up pieces into her palms with frantic, trembling precision, her fingers brushing dangerously close to the sharp edges as if physical pain might distract from the ache in her chest.

Cornelia pressed her lips into a pale line and curled her fingers tight into her palms over the debris. A spike of guilt pierced her chest, only to be promptly buried under the layer of rationalization. The damage was complete. An apology would not mend his bruised spirit, nor would she ever master shrinking her own stature to make him feel whole. She held a faint, distant hope that their philosophies might one day weave into the perfect harmony, but for now, an ocean stretched between them, and she allowed the tides to take her farther away from him.

She dumped the broken glass into the bin, wiping down the ruined floor until the room was pristine again. Only then, did she step into the parlor, where her suitcase rested silently in the corner as she urgently needed to draw bath. She rolled into the center of the floor and unzipped the lining, her hands heavy and slow. The last electric pulses of adrenaline that had sustained her finally drained away, leaving her with a bone-deep exhaustion.

With his call, Cornelia’s head snapped up, a faint flicker of life returning to her eyes. She set her jaw and gathered her small bottles and clean garments – the essentials needed to piece her composure back together. It pained her to look at him; the vibrant, breathing canvas of a man was gone, replaced by a shadow carved out by her own tongue. No words of hers could bridge the void she had opened in his chest.

“Thank you…for the bath,” her voice hushed, and laced with a carefully guarded softness. It was the closest a woman of her pride could ever come to saying I’m sorry - a truce offered in a whisper. Deep down, she wished he would simply hate her, to tell her leave and never come back. Hatred would be so much cleaner. Hatred would make leaving easy.

In the warm, steam-filled bathroom, she stood before the heavy porcelain tub as the water was pure and hot. Her cold fingers tangled into the hem of her damp, soiled clothes, slowly peeling the heavy rain-soaked fabric away from her skin. A strange levity washed over her as she recalled the officer’s crude remark from earlier, that he was right. She was, in fact, not wearing any underwear today.

She stood bare before the fogged glass of the mirror, looking down at the pale expanse of her skin. She traced the dark splatters of dried mud, separating the grime from the sun-dappled constellations of her freckles. Seeking grounding, her hands slid up her inner thighs, across the soft curve of her stomach, and cupped her breath, letting out a long, shuddering sigh.

One leg at a time, she stepped into the heat.

The water stung her skin like a thousand tiny needles. The moment she sank beneath the surface, the crystal-clear water swirled into a murky silt-filled grey – clouded with the first, sweat, and dried blood of her chaotic escape. The rising steam opened her skin and her thoughts, letting them float like ghosts through the vapor.

She had only ever wanted a simple, quiet life with him. In the stillness of her mind, she had painted it a thousand times: a soft, light-filled house, the gentle ordinary mornings, the uncomplicated grace of being his wife. It was a modest dream. Yet her own temper had burned the blueprint before they could even lay the foundation. She had destroyed her own haven.

The weight of it hit her like a physical blow. Cornelia pulled her knees tight against her chest, buried her face into her soaked arms, and wept. A ragged sob tore from her throat and she slammed her hand violently over her mouth, muffling the sound against her wet palm so it would not bleed through the heavy wooden door. She shook violently in the rising steam, stifling her cries into her own skin until her lungs burned for air.

Wiping her eyes, she forced herself into the precision of a ritual. She scrubbed the grime from her scalp, washed her face, and ran the scented soap over her neck and limbs, scrubbing with a ferocity until every last impurity was washed away.

When she finally stood, water ran down her body in clear, shimmering beads. Wrapping herself tightly in the plush towel he had laid out, stepped over to the mirror and wiped a clear circle through the condensation. She examined her reflection, tracing the delicate watercolor of pale yellow and deep violent bruises blooming across her arms, legs, and hips from her frantic flight.

Back in the bedroom, she selected her attire with detachment. She stepped into a sheer, intricate laced, followed by a low-waist denim miniskirt that rested lightly over her hips. Finally, she dragged a soft white tank top over her head, feeling the thin cotton settle against her waist. She took her time assembling the illusion of composure. She shook out her damp tresses, letting them dry into their natural waves, slicked a sweet, glossy shine onto her lips, and slid the heavy gold ring back onto her finger as her single ornament. In her hand, she carried a pair of black kitten heels; she despised the vulnerability of bare feet, needing the metallic click of a heel to fasten her to the floor.

She glided through the quiet hall until she spotted Arthur sitting motionless.

Cornelia stopped at the doorframe, watching his heavy posture. Not long ago, she had stood in a doorway feeling desperate for his affection. Now, she felt trapped in an unreadable, impenetrable cell. She caught her lower lip between her front teeth, letting go before biting down hard enough to taste copper.

“I just realized it’s about time for dinner,” she said softly, her voice cutting through the stillness. It was the one mundane task she had left to cling to. “Can we go to the market to pick up a couple of things?”

Without another word, she placed her shoes down and slipped her feet into her heels, a click echoing off the floor as she straightened her spine.

She decided that the less she said right now, the better off they would be.

Arthur found himself now swathed by the density of packed soil, completely bound by the earthly prison that his misdeeds delivered him into. His head protruded from the confines, and around him were the faces of many enraged people whose fists clutched heavy stones. Their clenched hands twitched with zeal, as if his death were a long anticipated retribution. It was Cornelia, this unimaginably beautiful woman lost to her own heedlessness, and who was likewise at the edge of dismemberment, who would make the rightful first throw. And his crime? Perversion.

His wife had crossed a one-way threshold; she had died just now, he watched it happen, he could see it in the waning intensity of her verdant eyes. Butterflies evacuated in a plume from her lively lungs, now superseded by a spider’s cobwebbing. The usual cruelty and lack of restraint he often delighted so much in had now moldered into maudlin navel-gazing. She roasted in her own misery until her heart was dried jerky. The startling reversion from strong willed martinet to unmoored damsel could only be explained by the dimensions of their reality shifting.

Rosemary’s ranting vanished into a void, and his eyes slowly became fixed on this new version of Cornelia, who he hardly could recognize or stomach. She was a stranger to him. This display of retroactive jealousy was unlike anything he had ever witnessed. Never before had she erupted with such hysterical, territorial fury—not even over Holger. This was not the self-assuredness of a goddess, this was the behavior of a little girl who could not understand the essentialness of a callous; he had to protect his fragile heart in some way, and his indifference to Rosemary and her husband's pain was but a survival strategy. Cornelia failed to conceive this, but in his reflections, he knew that her past traumas were the source of such septic insecurity.

While Arthur saw only a woman bereft of her command in Cornelia, Rosemary’s obsequious temperament resulted in her own dismantlement immediately, being intolerant of such rogue vituperations from this blonde stranger’s virulent tongue. Arthur interjected, a glowering pair of ashen eyes that lacerated Rosemary into two halves, his malevolent wishes preached into this cold existence without care: “This is a disgusting display of all the things I’ve come to loath about you most, Rosemary! Love reduces you to this—this pliable, weak mess. I could never love a woman so blind to the power she wields over a man. Get out of my sight!” He shouted, the volume cutting through her like a white-hot blade.

As soon as the actor assuming the role as ‘wife’ departed from stage right, Rosemary made a theatrical exit from the scene disguised by a victim’s tears. As she fled, she shouted “Nobody, nobody misses your pretentious ass! Stay far away from me, Arthur!” Her car peeled away, leaving behind the offensive impression of her tires in the yard. How predictable of her to leave her mark.

An arduous silence consumed the entire home, until the ear-splitting blast of ceramic rang from the kitchen like a massive gong. Arthur felt its vibration halt the blood in his veins. This collision was bringing forth an excruciating aftermath; such a metaphorical stress position was perhaps tolerable by emotional contortionists, but his spine was being forced into a backward, 30° angle. The tension built slowly, and he could feel the displacement of vertebrae as the rack increased it's fold further, without mercy. He felt entirely helpless, totally lost in the inescapable predicament he had locked himself in.

The thudding of the door signalled elopement, and instinctually he ran after his wife—the edge of a precipice could not stop him from diving after her. Whatever hatred she spewed—scalding flames met with blistering winter winds—could not keep him apart from her. Her suffering was his own. He loved her enormously even now, especially now.

His tired legs carried him out into the ragged storm, which met him with the resistance of a strong squall. Only a fragment of Cornelia was captured in his lens as she pivoted, now consumed by the forest’s dense, breathing walls. Rumbling thunder stalked her as she bolted, crackling unpredictably and shaking the ground beneath her with each advancing step. Undulating, heavy clouds eliminated the sun’s light as if it were an eclipse. Arthur’s voice in the distance could hardly be heard beneath the storm’s many symphonic layers; smattering raindrops, sobbing winds, and booming grumbles. But still, a panicked, masculine roaring persisted.

Her shorter legs could only carry her so far until she lagged, falling within his grip's reach. He seized her by the wrists with an assertive yet carefully controlled grip. He manipulated her body into facing him, physically overpowering her natural urge to oppose him. “Cornelia!” He cried out, his lungs heaving, “How can I look away now that your soul has been stripped of its essence?” He let her wrists go at the cue of her physical resistance. She now knew, without doubt, that her vulnerability was clearer than glass. “That woman is nothing to me. Please, believe me—!”

Her bare feet served as an invitation for his grovelling, a perfect platform to beg for forgiveness and pray that his salvation had not been lost to eternal damnation. The dignified, erect stance of a man was now beaten into a submissive child’s pose. The muck of the forest floor coated his knees, his hands, and the rain beat down against his back. He deferentially bowed his head. With his fingers wrapped about her ankles, he began kissing her feet, which were dirtied with wet remnants of grass and speckled grit. He didn’t care, anything that touched her skin was made entirely pure to him. He had branded her with his mannish filth, and he abandoned all hope of ever tasting the purity of something that rotted in his care. He wouldn’t dream of it.

“I’m a fucking worm, so please, treat me like one! I am begging you, please just don’t leave me! Not like this.” He said, his hot breath could be felt on the arches of her feet. “I forfeit my place as husband! I’ve never convinced myself that I was worthy of it, anyway. I’ll be your drudge, if nothing else. Live your life how you please, and I’ll disappear into a corner somewhere.” He began to bawl, hot tears falling between the spaces of her toes.

“It’s all true! My entire life I have been at war; the male condition is a constant struggle between my physical desire and my own reason. You are the only woman who has ever brought me an internal peace, a sense of real morality. I want for nothing, absolutely nothing when I am with you. Do you hear me?” He shouted, then began to rise onto his knees. His face was covered in wet dirt, his eyes were red with the wild fever of mourning. “This simplistic view of love—that loyalty is owed by default, that monogamy is an obligation rather than a choice—I reject it. True devotion can’t be commanded; it’s all consuming. Only then can one honestly, wholly surrender their independence and weave it with another soul. You are desired, and I desire you violently.” He explained. He couldn’t change his beliefs, they were essential to who he was, even if it pained her to hear it.

Her mother’s voice remained entombed within her memory, preserved like a prehistoric insect caught in clear amber: Zij is een loopster.

Cornelia had always been a thing of violent flights and swift evasions - a hallucination who struck with her vitriolic blow and evaporated into the fog before the skin even began to swell. As a small girl, she had wrenched herself from her mother’s suffocating embrace, offering her fragile boners to the roaring mechanics to oncoming traffic. In primary school, the recess bell was never an invitation to play, but an overture – a song luring her past the rusted iron gates to dissolve into the veins of the city. In her youth, she vanished for weeks at a time, returning only with soil underneath her fingernails. She was a high priestess of exodus. Leaving was her only native language.

And so, beneath the weeping, slate-gray sky, she simply continued to leave. Her tragedy was not the instinct to flee, but the terrible curse that she will always return.

The falling rain descended the braided canopy like a medicinal baptism - a liquid, chemical tide soaking through her clothes earthed as she breached the deep forest. Heavy, swollen drops struck her skin like bruises, their frigid shock biting into the volatile fever burning just beneath her ribs. It was the predictable, ghastly design of her inner weather; she surged to a white-hot, ruinous boil in a heartbeat, only to freeze into a sub-zero indifference the next.

To lose herself in the woods was no tragedy; the wilderness was merely the mirror of her own tangled interior; and she had always known how to navigate the dark. But as she cut through the blurred, emerald maze of leaves, a sudden, iron clasp locked around her wrist. Her breath hitched, catching like shattered porcelain in her throat.

Because she had always been an unendurable tempest - a nuisance no soul had ever cared to tame - no one had ever pursued her. This was the maiden voyage of her capture! The very first time a man had dared to hunt her through the brambles, track her scent through the wet earth, and trap her within his desperate reach.

The violent shock of perspective nailed her heels into the mud. Her wrist twisted, a feral instinct squirming against his grasp to reclaim her sanctity, her absolute bodily autonomy – the only shrine she worshipped. Yet, as her name recoiled from his throat, her chest flared with sour acid.

Lord, she was theatrical – she possessed enough self-awareness to acknowledge her flair for grand tragedy – but this grotesque, desperate monologue pinned her to the damp earth, filling her with the urge to tear her flesh free and run until her lungs burst from the icy air.

A shuddered breath spilled from her lips, thick with an unbearable, suffocating disgust. She was utterly unprepared to look at Arthur. She might not be ready for a month; her comeliness was entirely at the mercy of her mercurial temper. She stood frozen, watching him humiliate himself in the dirt at her feet. She looked down with dead eyes, fueled far more by a prickly, arrogant annoyance than any spark of amnesty.

At least, she thought, the trees would not share this embarrassment.

“Jesus, Arthur…” her voice echoed, thin and shark as a razor sliding through silk.

She yanked her legs backward, stepping clean out of his desperate reach. Her eyes pinned him down in his knees-in-the-dirt posture, holding him there in the filth, prolonging his exposure for an agonizing beat simply to savor the (currently metaphorical) weight of her heel upon his neck. It was pitiful, truly.

“Get up,” she rasped, her hand flicking in a short gesture of pure dismissal.

The melodrama of his repentance was exhausting her, though it whispered a dangerous lie into her ear – perhaps she was not the monster in this play after all. She felt like an obscure Madonna hoisted onto an unholy altar, listening to a pathetic, weeping devotee beg the Lady of Sorrows for an unearned penance.

“You make yourself lower than a worm,” she said, her voice dropping into a lethal mumble. “And yet, you are my husband. As my husband, I would walk through the very fires of hell the moment you stray. I will ruin you. So do not tempt me by begging for forgiveness like some mindless, crawling thing. A worm is crushed underfoot, Arthur. You will be tortured as my husband.”

He was a straying believer crawling back to a vengeful deity – one that was expected to offer grace, but wield only a whip. How many prayers could she wring from his throat before he was clean? She remembered being forced to recite five as a child just for stealing a biscuit before dinner. For Arthur, she would demand a lifetime of Rosaries, spoken until his tongue bled.

To an outside observer, it was a scene born of pure madness: two adults bleeding and mud-caked in a rain-downed forest, trapped in a nightmare of their own making. Arthur continued his desperate litany, chanting praises to her majesty, springing grand, poetic prose to justify the pathetic, ancient ropes of male weakness. He was trash. He was the quintessential, wretched man. She would have spat directly into the mud on his face if she didn’t love him so ruinously.

That was his only mercy.

“Arthur,” she cut in, her tone dripping with disdain. “What is this pathetic philosophical breakdown? It’s embarrassing.”

She stood motionless, studying the streak of dark grime across his cheekbone and the unhinged, feverish devotion burning in his bloodshot eyes. A suffocating weight settled on her ribs. She loved him – loved him so violently it felt like an internal hemorrhaging. But watching him scramble for literary excuses, watching him romanticize his own cowardice into a masterwork of tragic art, make something snap rampantly behind her ribs.

“I am not accepting a single word of your speech,” she said, her voice hard as polished diamonds. “I love you…God, help my miserable soul, I love you enough that it is killing me. But I am not stupid, and I will not pretend your ridiculous little soliloquy makes a lick of sense. You aren’t going to change. You can’t change, because you’d rather hide behind poetic words than carry the weight of what you’ve done.”

She did not retreat. She stepped forward instead, towering directly above him, letting her long shadow swallow his frame whole.

“Don’t you dare sit in the dirt and lecure me about loyalty being ‘simplistic’ just to salve your fragile, bruised ego,” she spat, leaning down into his space until he could feel the cold rain dripping from her hair. “Do not call my devotion simple. You call fidelity an obligation for lesser minds? She the fuck up, you coward. My love is not simple. Desire is cheap, Arthur. A stray dog has desire. Loyalty requires a spine – and you were clearly born spineless.”

She reached down, her fingers brushing slowly against his cheek. It was not an act of tenderness; it was a possessive, predatory claim. Her touch dragged heavily over his skin, a butcher assessing a prized cut.

“You have no concept of what real destruction looks like,” she whispered, her thumb pressing hard into his lips until he tasted iron. “If I choose to, Arthur, I will dismantle you entirely. I will strip away every shred of your pathetic pride, incinerate every victory you’ve ever claimed, and guy you until your name is a forgotten footnote. You will be nothing more than the ruined ghost of a man who wasn’t strong enough to hold what was his.” She snatched her hand back as if his touch scorched her skin. Her eyes glistened in the dim light – a devastating, lethal mixture of profound grief and total dismissal.

“I love you,” she whispered, casting her gaze down at him, “But sometimes I despise what a coward you are so much more. Take me home.”

It was as if his mother had stepped out of the frame to haunt them, Arlene’s resemblance to the photographed woman being so arresting that mistaking her for a ghost was suddenly not so reality bending. Their likeness in appearance opened a familiar wound, like a parent catching sight of what is certainly her missing child, only for hope to collapse when the face belongs to a stranger. Their mother, Opal, had shared the same coiffure, the same pewter green eyes, and the unmistakably broad Irish face. The family bore a sort of liminality, subscribing to an aesthetic that disrupted modernity. The Melbournes shared this unusual aura about them; they were a group of characters that dreamers met in the infinite confines of their sleeping consciousness, and despite possessing an elusive familiarity, the dreamer remained nostalgic for their presence upon waking.

Arthur banished the luggage, expelling them to the corner of the room in a time-out fashion. The minor shift of the baggage caused a creak in the wooden foundation. He and Arlene played verbal badminton, but Arthur’s rigidness limited their ability to truly ease into a casual game of conversation. Arlene masked her apprehensions well, but felt Cornelia’s presence in the home was a total optical illusion—impossible to make sense of, no matter the angle of perspective. Her fruitless pondering only led to more confusion. In fact, if her memory was a reliable servant, the most recent tabloids were disastrous, they had become a spectacle of the public. Most everyone assumed the entire project was derelict. She couldn’t get that image out of her head—Arthur, staring upward at the sun from his knees, and Neeltje’s body facing the moon, completely embarrassed by his public snap.

But Arlene was skilled in dodging the discomfort thrust upon her by life, so it was just another topic among many that were tossed into the discard pile, a trash heap of unmentionables. She refused to broach the subject—she knew better than to pry on her brother, of all people, who guarded his privacy with barbed wire and iron walls. His romantic escapades, however questionable they appeared on the surface, belonged to a personal property that she dare not trespass on.

Somehow, by burying one discomfort, Arlene unearthed a more shocking find. While she literally had one foot out the door, her face was lit up by a mental reminder. “Oh! Before I forget!” She fished her phone from her pocket and began typing a nondescript text message, the delivery confirmed by the phone’s characteristic swiping pip. “Some woman came by looking for you, Art. An associate from Oxford, or something.” She shrugged, then said, “I just texted her. She seemed pretty desperate to chat with you, so I didn’t want to keep her waiting. I promised to let her know when you returned.” She saw herself out the door, and the engine of her car could be heard from behind the house soon thereafter.

All life drained from Arthur’s face at his sister’s unperturbed words. His pallor faded into transparency as his color collected into an infusion bag. An indescribable, sick feeling consumed his lower half—an angry, slick eel suffered an attack of claustrophobia while the walls of his stomach caged it. The creature heatedly planned its escape from the narrow confines of his body, threatening to evacuate by any means necessary, along with all the emesis that pooled in its habitat.

His focus fearfully travelled to meet Cornelia’s, and when her electric eyes caught his own, he felt immediately threatened by syncope. Finally, his year-long role as the adultress’s accomplice would result in his very predictable comeuppance. Still, he never once envisioned it would be with such unforgiving timing. This karmic castigation would certainly serve as an unforgettable lesson; a slap was worth one thousand lectures, so they said, but this slap was with a steel gauntlet.

He heard another vehicle approaching, the purring of the engine coming to a sudden halt. A slam of the door. Time was racing with light, the events were unravelling at an alarming and uncontrolled pace. A strenuous knocking reverberated from the front door and into the moaning walls. Arthur was properly cataleptic, as if playing dead were a successful defense mechanism among humans.

“I know you’re here! Let me in!” A caramel-sweet voice hollered, her mood was perfectly antonymous to said saccharinity. The only thing now separating his past life from his present was the infirm door, and the lock that hardly held it shut. “I won’t leave until you talk to me, you fucking bastard!” Her voice broke, hinting that the tears were rolling in hot streams down her round, sweetheart-shaped face.

Rosemary existed as the main recipient of his carnal venting for the better part of a year, all which occurred prior to his work relocation. She was a simple beauty with simple brains. They hovered in the same circle that made up the English department of Oxford University, which had eventually transformed into the sinful playground of their unexpected affair. Their relationship was best characterized by Rosie’s desperate man-chasing, a behavior driven by her propensity to seek validation from every male in sight. This, paired inaptly with Arthur’s apathetic attitude towards her, plus his general dissoluteness, made for a very sad coupling. He was never truly crazy about her, but she was a naturally docile creature, and bent to his whims under the unspoken threat of being found out by her unsuspecting husband.

Arthur conceded to her demands. No matter the direction from which he travelled, there was no way out but through. He shakily unlocked the door, and immediately she rushed in with a dripping trail, splattering clover-shaped droplets in the wake of each inward step. The woman’s shirt was half soaked, and her capri-jeans were touched by the second hand dampness of the air. Her anguished stare first found Arthur, the once Nobody who had found fame after the heat of their affair, the gale from a shutting door eliminating the flame in one motion—his sudden abandonment and subsequent flee to Belgium had been done entirely without notice, leaving Rosie ambushed by his apparent detachment.

She then saw Neeltje, this statuesque beauty, this imposing figure that summoned immediate feelings of inadequacy in her.

“I told you it was over. It’s been over, Rosie. I’m married now.” Arthur spoke lowly, his awkward stance reducing the edge of his austere tone. Rosie shook her head in disbelief, a disgusted scoff slipping from her quivering lips.

“Yes, I see that you found someone better to stick your dick in!” She spat back, to which Arthur shook his head disapprovingly. Rosie turned her gaze to Cornelia, and through her atrophied vocal cords, she began to rant persistently; a year of unresolved frustrations freefalling from her uncensored tongue.

“I cried every day because you disappeared for weeks without answering my calls!” She exclaimed, her eyes darting between Cornelia and Arthur as if observing their imaginary game of ping-pong. “And then you have the nerve to act surprised when I show up demanding answers? Last week, when I finally managed to reach you, you called me a whore—as if we both don’t know exactly what this was…” She gestured to herself and him, “Oh, did he not tell you?” Rosie turned theatrically to Cornelia, with her hands clasping together. “He likes fucking married women. He’s a pervert!” Rage bled from her eyes, and she bravely faced her ex-lover once more. “Perhaps you should also show her your sick collection of polaroids—”

“That’s enough.” Arthur cut her off, fists clenched and aching by their own pressure.

The air in the room didn’t just grow quiet; it died.

Cornelia caught the subtle, miserable spasm in Arthur’s jaw -- that telltale shrink of a coward caught dead to rights. It was a reflex she had seen on other men and the sight of it made her blood run cold. The quiet life she thought she was building was collapsing in real time, before the first brick was ever laid. Her heart hammered a heavy, sickening beat against her ribs. Every step she took across the parlor pushed a sharp groan from the aged oak beneath her feet, counting down the distance between her and the man who was about to destroyed her.

“Arthur, what is going o-”

The query dissolved, cut down mid-breath by a second voice.

It spilled into the space like spoiled wine - dripping with a sickly tenderness that instantly curdled into the venomous exhaustion of a woman pushed to her absolute limit.

The moment stretched until it snapped. Cornelia stood paralyzed, forced to witness the wreck with the awareness of someone who had survived this exact brand of devastation before. Sudden, vivid flashes tore through her mind - standing in a dark hallway years ago, listening to the floorboard creak, playing the unbothered girlfriend tallying the foreign shoes lined up by the front door and loud moans of the voice of a man she loved and one that was not her own.

She turned her attention to the intruder, picking her apart with a predatory focus. It was a cruel impulse, but she couldn’t stop herself. She took in the limp, mousy hair framing a sweetheart face, the faded, practical garments that made the woman look entirely out of place. She appeared roughly Arthur’s age, bearing a plain sort of grace. Positioned next to him, they looked tragically aligned. Natural. Correct.

The realization hit her like an open flame to bare skin. Bitter, hot bile swelled in the back of her throat, burning as she forced it down.

Rosie.

The name echoed mercilessly through her head. Rosie, Rosie, Rosie. Was that the soft, intimate word he used to murmur into the dark long before Cornelia ever entered his world?

Arthur opened his mouth, and his immediate, defensive stammer ignited a frantic back-and-forth between them that ripped through the room. Cornelia gasped, pulling a cold drag of air into her lungs as the floor seemed to pitch under her feet. This woman was practically vibrating with unwashed misery, and a grotesque curiosity dug into Cornelia’s mind: What kind of wreck had Arthur left in his wake before he came to her?

The three of them stood locked in an oppressive, three-way standoff, waiting for someone to pull the trigger. She stared at them - these timid, soft-spined English souls, snapping like stray dogs through a gate, lacking the guts to actually finish the fight. If someone was going to draw blood, it was going to be her. The only real choice was who was she going to shoot down first.

Rosie kept spilling her guts - a relentless, hysterical stream of grievance - and Cornelia tried. God, she tried to hold the line of her own sanity. She tried to convince herself that Arthur’s past was a closed ledger, that the mess he made had nothing to do with his devotion to her now. But every drop of composure evaporated the instant Rosie confirmed the bitter truth, they had been sleeping together while Rosie was still wearing another man’s ring.

In that split second, Cornelia’s eyes locked onto Arthur.

Loyalty was her religion, her one non-negotiable code - and in a single sentence, her husband stood exposed as a willing partner in the exact kind of moral rot she hated most. Whatever tender feeling she had held for him withered instantly, replaced by freezing emptiness. She felt a physical ache behind her ribs, so sharp it made her gasp. The shot had been fired. Rage would have been a mercy, but she refused to hand him the relief of seeing her lose control -- he didn't deserve it, not yet. She tuned Rosie out entirely, letting the woman drown in her middle-aged meltdown, and cut straight into Arthur’s path.

Her face wasn’t twisted in her usual impatience. It lacked the lethal glare she usually weaponized to make men recoil. It was pure, unmitigated grief - a crushing, suffocating weight that had been settling into her bone marrow since they left her Belgian lands hours ago. If he cared for her at all, she wanted him to look directly at the blade he had repeatedly plunge into a wound that may never heal again.

She felt as though she’d been dragged onto a stage for a public execution. As if these wretched creatures had constructed this entire private play just to strip her of her dignity and leave her with nothing. She closed her eyes against the shame, her chest heaving as she fought down the wave of pure nausea from the humiliation of standing there.

Her hands shook as she reached out, planting her palms against the sides of his face. She needed the physical shock of his skin -- needed to know if this was concrete reality or if she was suffocating in a nightmare. His jaw was warm, tense, terribly real. She opened her eyes, wide and hollow, dark with the kind of ruin that leaves permanent scars. Her lashes fluttered as she fought a losing battle against the sting behind her eyelids; she would rather swallow glass than let Rosie see her weep.

“Arthur…you were in an affair.”

It wasn’t a question. It was a flat verdict that tore her throat on the way out. Her thumbs brushed over the corners of his mouth, feeling the small, frantic twitches of his muscles, hearing his shallow breaths, watching his tongue dart out to wet his lips in absolute dread. A storm of vicious questions slammed into her mind: How could you help dismantle someone else’s home? Did you hold her with the same desperate reverence you give to me? Did you love her? Do you love me?

And then, her composure cracked straight down the middle. Without her consent, a broke, desperate whisper leaked out her throat:

“Will you go back to her if-”

She severed the thought mid-word, letting the unfinished question hang in the air between them like a hangman’s knot. If he had any sense at all, he knew precisely what she asked. She watched his face with horrifying intensity, as if waiting to watch the lies form like black ice on his tongue. Her soul lay flayed open. To find Arthur -- her husband -- was a willing participant in infidelity was a mortal blow to everything she believed in. How could she ever lay her head on his chest without wondering who else he had torn down for sport? Worst of all, when will it be her turn? She looked past him for a fraction of a second, feeling a sudden, sickening wave of tragic pity for Rosie’s cuckolded husband.

She slid her hands, flattening her palms against his chest. Beneath her fingertips, his heart was hammering, but felt like a mockery against her skin. Every breath she pulled in tasted like dust and shattered glass. She wanted to drive her fingernails into his flesh, to tear his shirts to ribbons, to scream into his mouth until he bled, but the weight of his growing moral ruin was a stone crushing her ribs.

“Look at me,” her voice dropping into a thick, suffocating tar. Drawing her frame up, her eyes red-rimmed, glossy, and brimming with unshed pain, she looked at him as if he were dead.

“I can’t do this, Arthur, not like this. ” she whispered, stripping every drop of warmth from her tone.

Then, she turned the full, scorching weight of her gaze onto Rosemary. Her posture locked into an unbending line as her grief hardened into something merciless and black as obsidian.

”And you,” Cornelia spat, taking two steps forward, inspecting her like a smear of grease on a refined dress. “Why are you crawling through my house, whining for the stale, pathetic leftovers of a man who moved on and married me. Look at you. Did you honestly believe your tawdry little history made you sacred? You are nothing more than a desperate, sad excuse for a woman who threw her family’s dignity in the first for a taste of importance she was too weak to ever earn on her own.”

Rosemary recoiled as if struck, her mouth opening to spew some righteous defense, but Cornelia didn’t just speak - the dam began to overflow and her voice tore though the rafters, a wild, echoing shriek of pure anguish and blistering hatred.

“There are so many things in the world I hate,” Cornelia roared, the sound cracking down the middle, shredded with tears she refused to spill, “But what I despise the most are parasitic, weeping hypocrites. You broke your own home for a few stolen hours with this pathetic pervert? And now you stand in mine, begging me for sympathy? Be fucking for real, that’s low, even for cockroaches.”

She closed the remaining distance in a flash, her face inches from Rosemary’s, her chest heaving like a wounded beast, her throat burning as she screamed the final words into the woman’s pathetic, cowering face:

“How dare the two of you play with someone’s life just because you were bored and fucking horny. Cry. Me. A. Fucking. River!”

The sheer violence of her own voice echoed off the walls, leaving the room vibrating in the awful aftermath. A heavy, shuddering breath broke through Cornelia’s chest as she turned her back on both of them. The terrible pressure that had been building behind her temple since the airport finally burst.

It was not tears.

A hot, metallic warmth trickled down her upper lip, dark and heavy.

Cornelia raised a shaking hand, her fingertips coming away strained with a bright, crimson ribbon of blood pooling from her nose. She stared at the stain on her skin, numb to the bone.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” She whispered into the empty air.

Then, the dam broke completely. A shrill, violent shriek tore from her voice - a sound so sharp, so jagged, it shattered the heavy quiet of the house and echoed off the rafters like breaking glass. It was the sound of a woman whose moral compass - and whose heart - had been smashed into pieces.

“She better be out of this fucking house by the time I get back!” she screamed, her voice splitting with pure venom. “Oh what the hell, what am I saying...maybe you two should fuck right now for old times' sake. Why fuck over one marriage, when you can do two. God fucking dammit."

Without looking back, she turned and left the wreckage, searching for the only sanctuary left: the kitchen.

The second she crossed the threshold, her legs gave out against the cold floorboards, her body curly inward as a wave of sobs finally broke through her. The blood from her nose mixed with the hot, bitter tears smearing across her face in a grim, tragic mess. To know Arthur was capable of participating in such cheap, deceitful cruelty destroyed her. She was trapped -- alone again, locked in another relationship built on a foundation of sand.

The sorrow curdled into blinding crimson.

Her hands twitched against the floor, starving for something solid, something that would break as loudly as her trust was breaking inside. Her fingers caught a stack of heavy porcelain plates sitting in the breakfast book. She swept them up, raised them high, and shattered them against the floorboards. A single ceramic shard flew up, slicing open the skin of her palm.

The explosive crunch of ceramic echoed through the house - a violent shock confirming she was still breathing, that this nightmarish hell was real. A ragged, soul-tearing sob ripped from her ribs. This marriage was a slow death of the spirit. Her very existence was an exhaustion. She had never known the sweet, golden light of absolute trust; she had simply been dragged into the web of someone else’s dirty secrets…again.

Cornelia leaned heavily against the frame of the back door, her lungs gasping for clean air in a house that tasted only of deceit. It was no longer a home; it was a cage. Careless of her torn spirit and blood-smeared face, her hand found the brass handle.

She shoved it open, stepped out into the biting cold, and slammed the door behind her with a thunderous, bone-rattling boom that shook the very foundations of the house.

The hum of the half-filled aircraft was placed in the same categorical sphere as a fly-by mosquito, both strikingly equivalent in measurements of annoyance. The only thing that made the entire experience even remotely bearable was that they had secured business class tickets, and would be spared from the working-class charisma of economy seating. A small curtain segregated them from both premium and standard economy sections, as was simultaneously true for first class. It would have been well within either of their financial means to secure first-class accommodations, but considering he had been the purchaser, he couldn’t bring himself to spend so frivolously when the flight was just over an hour long.

Foolish to think that their troubles would dissolve as soon as they found their seats. Neeltje sat beside him, silent as a fresh corpse whose death he was responsible for. The building pressure of the cabin mirrored the growing tension in their relationship—increasing steadily with the incline. The speed of the craft, however, did not reflect the feeling of time, which moved at the rate of molasses. She read her short story, he opened a document on his laptop and typed hastily. They pursued their own leisures independently, but both of them secretly had the other at the forefront of their mind. They were literally right beside each other, yet in this deep well of sadness and misunderstanding, it somehow felt as if his wife were waving at him from the tiny patchwork fields of the Belgian polders below.

Their arrival in Winchester did little to ease the tension, though the change of scenery offered a welcome distraction, which they were able to delight in from the dark film of the black cab’s window. The little downtown area was quaint, as it featured a fine selection of locally run businesses, historical sights, and tourist-beloved restaurants. Though, their brief drive through was only a small leg of their journey on land, for Arthur lived on the dead outskirts, separated by several miles from the bustling heart of England’s forgotten capital. Rather, his home was tucked away deep in forestry, where all around it was otherwise uninhabited. The only route was by a poorly maintained dirt road.

The silence in the car was obstructed by a gentle rustling of purple leaf-plum branches that swayed in accordance to the unpredictable ebbing of the winds. A slow, scattered rainstorm grew heavier in their clouds by the minute, and the road before them melted into sludge as it dumped down. This challenged the driver’s competence by disarming the tire’s grip. Thus far, England was proving to reflect Arthur’s gothic soul well with its moody weather and vapid despondency. There was a small breakthrough of sunshine, which took the form of Arthur’s fingertips laying over Neeltje’s—it was a non-verbal apology, a prideful man’s way of offering truce.

When they were finally delivered to their destination, Arthur immediately found himself relieved that, in his efforts to improve his physical prowess, he had achieved beautiful order on his property; what was normally an jungle unkept by an indolent bachelor, he had since transformed it into a well-tended botanical zion just before his most recent departure, where he was more motivated than ever to graduate from his bachelorhood. He was, at that time, a man dominated by severe heartbreak—how blessed he was not to have fallen into the pit of hopelessness as well. Had fate treated him with a lesser kindness, he would not be returning home with a wife.

His home stood as the only piece of architecture for many kilometers, and because of this isolation, the house bore a somewhat uncanny ambience. The spacious cottage was of Eastlake aesthetic, which was a subcategory of Victorian style homes constructed just before the 20th century. Arthur had purchased the old property following his small success with The Taxidermist, and had since poured a stupid amount of personal funds into keeping it alive. The dark paint had chipped away since its birth, the shutters matured into a geriatric state, and the Queen Ann style windows had lost their clarity to the sun’s blanching authority over time. The principal problem of owning the old house was its demanding cost of maintenance, yet he continued to tolerate it out of pure stubbornness. He had grown strangely attached to its antique, macabre charm. It was home.

The rain suppressed the dense cloud of fog that settled over a vibrant bed of grass, and the two paced through its trace mist when forming a path to the door, all the while avoiding the cold pangs of water that seemed to chase after their every step. A mourning dove coo’ed in the distance, crickets chirped without any rhythmic tuning from a massive pair of hydrangea bushes, whose blooms were a variety of periwinkle and dusty mauve. The winds poured onto the porch and jossled a rocking chair erratically, as if the seat was occupied by the worn-out ghost seeking restful retreat.

Long before Neeltje, he had often reflected on the fate of his crab-apple tree. It erupted with magnificent blossoms in the spring time, but it gathered at its feet a grotesque display of infant fruitlets by the time moggy summer put May to its death. All of the green kin faded at different stages of decomposition—a carpet of apple cadavers. A swarm of flies droned about the rot, making a feast of the soured decay as if it were their final supper. The scene felt like a daily dose of cinema. From his kitchen window, he watched the tree in quiet fascination, his hands turning red from the hot dishwater as he stood transfixed by the deadly descent of yet another apple.

Yes, he now remembered with a nostalgic ache that once he lived in total disillusionment, and he recalled it with staggering clarity. He, at that time, had yet been affected by the rosepedal caress of love. He had never known the anguish of a broken heart, as he had never truly found someone capable of inflicting such sorrow upon his hardened self. He felt hollow when wading in this strange, mourning reflection. The tree was no longer the dead leaf resonance of a lonely man. No longer were there maggots and flies that infested its roots, only humble Cosmia moths that flourished in the living branches. They breathed in the fresh, flowery air—breathing no longer felt suffocated by the putrefying odor produced by a cemetery of this tree’s own making.

Arthur unlocked the front door, unveiling the first glimpse into his private, pre-Cornelia life. It laid before her in its unedited glory. The smell was undeniably his own; wool roving saturated in ivory soap, violet musk, and the ending note but a fading whisper—the trace of cloves barely detectable. The gray illumination of the storm crept in through sun-bleached windows, coloring the dim room with a wet shade of dreariness. The jacobean, dark-walnut furniture were like relics of a bygone era, like a staged historical display better suited for a museum rather than in a man’s humble home. His presence could be felt everywhere, as though he lingered even in the dust—unseen, yet woven into the most unreachable corners of the house. The petite-floral wallpaper met with the wainscoting wreaked of hominess, and yet the pristine cleanliness of the space had been maintained despite being ancient and exposed to a century’s filth.

A very large, built-in bookshelf existed as the focal point of the living room, and on it lived no less than one hundred works. Many classics, but also a respectable collection of lesser known authors were on display, including every published work of his own. These publications amounted to only three: his novel, his poetry collection, and a single volume of short stories. The most recent anthology of love poems (those testimonials, as he called them) and their unfinished cookbook had clearly not yet found a home among its siblings, but once published, he fully intended for these pieces to join in their rightful place.

Beside a hutch containing fine china was a framed photograph of his mother, which hung dolefully on the wall. Tucked into the lower corner of the frame was a faded note, and hanging beside it was an upside bouquet of dried flowers from her wake. The photo’s scene was warm; a pale woman with a haunting, old-world beauty, dressed in a simple cotton housedress, her auburn ringlets cascaded loose around her shoulders. They spilled into the space of the curly-headed boy she cradled on her lap, who had clutched a thick lock of her hair and hid behind it, as though using it to shield his innocent, shy face from the camera. Despite being surrounded by so many interesting artifacts, this managed to dominate the room’s vibrational energy with an unusual, sepia-veiled obscurity.

A sudden crack of thunder eradicated their vision and replaced it with a stark white flash, until the atoms realigned themselves and the room faded back into clarity. Arlene stood in the center of the room, and Arthur shrieked.

“Oh, fuck!” Cried out Arlene, startled by her brother’s girlish vocal agility. “Oh fuck!” She repeated with added dramatic flare once her eyes befell on the Patisserie Princess. A joyful skipping brought Arlene into the arms of Neeltje, who she hugged with the familiarity of a childhood friend. “What the hell are you doing here?” She asked through her hardy, womanly laughter.

“I should ask you the same. What are you doing here?” Arthur said, red as a radish.

“Watching your house, you nit.” She grunted back with sisterly enmity.

“I don't remember having asked you to watch it.”

“You didn’t have to. Your houseplants were screaming my name for water, I answer to them.”

To Cornelia, the digital realm had long been an ornate snare. Despite her reign as a darling of social media, she harbored a fierce, burning disdain for the cold glass and empty promises of dopamine within her smartphone. It was nothing more than a utilitarian tether - a ledger that funded her livelihood, permitting her to broadcast the alchemy of her kitchen to the corners of the globe. Lately, she had noted her hands felt starved for tactile creations. They ached for the sensory memory of flour dusting a wooden counter, the cadence of kneading dough, or the precise, instinctual dab of a fingertip to taste whether a mixture required a dash of autumn or a zest of summer.

As the unhurried miles of the English countryside dissolved against the car window, she finally surrendered to the mass resting in her palm. The screen blinked awake, instantly fracturing the heavy silence.

Saar: YOU BITCH! LOOK AT THIS Saar: [shared image: Arthur and Neeltje pressed against each other at the airport, beneath a banner headline - DADDY ISSUES? 28-year-old influencer, Cornelia Peeters, cuddling it with 39-year-old author, Arthur Melbourne] Saar: CORNELIA Saar: DID YOU GUYS FUCK??????????????????? Followed swiftly by five missed calls from Saar.

A dull, pulsing throb grappled at the base of Neeltje’s skull, curling its way forward like a slow-moving tide. It felt as though the entire world viewed her existence through a single, reductive lens - reducing her flesh, her mind, and her artistry to the mechanical extraction of carnal currency. There was no room for grace in their eyes, only the insatiable hunger of a parasocial mob. Yet, refusing to let the panic take root, and feeling an odd, defiant absence of shame regarding the man beside her, she simply typed “Yes,” and chose to abandon the wreckage for another day.

Her eyes drifted down the digital graveyard of her notifications, watching the Belgian tabloids froth over the crumbs she left behind:

One missed call from Maxence. Maxence: Peper and I ate all the croissants and drank the milk, don’t worry about those. Three missed calls from Holger. Holger: Answer. Immediately blocked.

Hidden within the notifications was a festering of direct messages - men who collective delusions had shattered like fragile glass. To them, she had been a domestic fantasy, a curated accessible girlfriend who baked, laughed, and offered them the flavors of both her meals and her body to the altar of the internet. The sheer hypocrisy curdled in her stomach. She had never felt so lowly of herself, not once in her life until now.

With a soft sigh, she banished the divide to the dark depths of her bag, turning instead toward the moody, atmospheric scenery of England’s rolling mists. Cornelia possessed a soul deeply wedded to the gothic - she may not have worn the mourning laces, but she bled for its romanticism. As her gaze danced across the fleeting hedges, a sudden warmth jolted her. Arthur’s fingertips brushed against hers - an apology and a silent promise woven into the chill of a foreign land.

When the estate finally emerged from the hazy English mist, it felt less like a destination and more like an invocation of a childhood daydream. Cornelia caught her breath, her chest blossoming with an ache of observing such a beauty. The sprawling, geriatric cottage wore its year with a dignified grace that felt eerily familiar, as if it had waited decades just for her footprints.

The contrast of their histories hung thick in the air. He had inherited this breathing, organic monument of literary solitude, while she had spent her life whittling herself down in the claustrophobic verticality of the city. Her upbringing had been a relentless symphony of concrete, sirens, and towers touching a smog-choked heaven with spaces so narrow she had learned to curate every square inch just to breathe. To witness this vast ocean of open space was vinous.

The landscape beckoned to her feminine instinct to cultivate, to nurture, to participate in the ancient cycle of earth – watching green shoots rupture the soil, bloom into vibrant winsomeness, and eventually surrender to the frost. Already, her fingers twitched with the desire to plunge into the damp soil, to tear away the choking weeds, to whisper her darkest, most guarded secrets to the petals of old hydrangeas, and to steep herself in the rich, earthy scent of a love that belonged to the wild.

She wanted to devour every timber, every shadow, every whispered history of the home that Arthur adored, yet she forced herself to move with a reverent slowness. Stepping across the frame of the door, she instantly kicked off her muddied flats, unwilling to stain the ancient floorboards with the grime of her transit. She felt the cool, polished grain beneath her soles, responding with a soft, affectionate groan of protest under her weight.

Even here, surrounded by the timber and rain-kissed corners of his home, Arthur's existence was unmistakable. She could sense his thoughtful curation woven into every detail of the space - the deliberate placement of well-worn books, the careful nurturing of comfort, and the the attentive preservation of a history that was entirely, uniquely him. As the steady drum of rain blurred the world outside, every rain-drenched window and weathered beam seemed infused with his steadfast presence, mirroring the orison she had come to cherish so deeply.

Her admiration drifted naturally to the hutch of the room - a frame photograph resting like an ancestral deity, which she intuitively guessed was his mother. She studied the frozen features, marveling at how photography could trap light yet entirely miss the volatile, beating soul behind eyes. Within the sepia tones, she caught a rare, fleeting glimpse of a youthful Arthur. A tender wonder washed over her: Was he happy then? Is he happy now?

Her introspection shattered at the sound of a bright, feminine shriek echoing through the halls. She blinked, her eyes darting forward as a tumble of familiar auburn curls swept into the room. A jolt of pure vertigo struck her – Arlene? For a wild, chaotic second her mind raced through absurd possibilities, wondering if they shared some strange domestic arrangement. The thought of rooming with Maxence flashed like lightning outside, only to be instantly smothered as Arlene closed the distance, wrapping Cornelia in an embrace so fierce and genuine that it felt like reuniting with a long-lost sister.

There was a radiant luminescence to Arlene - an effortless, angelic warmth that seemed to banish the chill from any room she inhabited. It was a quality that darted envy in Cornelia’s chest; Arlene moved through the world like light itself, while Cornelia often felt more reserved by nature.

Watching the easy banter between the two siblings, Cornelia stepped back slightly, suddenly aware of her foreign status. A cold knot formed in her stomach. The realization pressed down on her: they had yet to publicly announce her as his wife.

Unconsciously, her thumb traced the smooth circle of gold resting against her finger. A quiet question lingered in her mind: Would their marriage be acknowledged tonight or will it be kept a secret worn with hesitation? She desperately longed to peer into Arthur’s mind, but as the tranquility of the house settled around them, she knew it demanded patience above all else.

mournfulroses

Anne Sexton, from a letter to Dennis Farrell, written in 1962, featured in "A Self-Portrait In Letters,"

An infant wailed a grating cry next to him as he waited alongside the many other travellers in a densely packed security line. The robotic beeping of metal detectors, the monotonous series of questions asked by bored officers, a father’s eruptive accusations directed at his wife (who may have left the house key in the door)—all of it enhanced the orderly chaos that defined this environment and its rigid processes. His patience was wearing down like a stick of chalk, and he gritted his teeth together, the clicking sounds of chronic TMJ just another rhythmic composition added to the symphony of polyphonic airport noises that penetrated his eardrums. His eyes met with the drooling newborn in front of him, who was being burped and bounced by its sleep-deprived mother in an anxious effort to minimize their obstructive howling. The redhaired woman shushed and quietly pleaded with her kin, but there was no success in compromising with a baby, so on it went, shrieking indignantly and triggering a catatonic response from a very overstimulated Arthur.

Behind him, he could feel the warmth radiating from his wife’s proximity—this was the only mild comfort offered to him as they waited their turn, subjected to this circus which they audaciously dubbed a checkpoint—but he grew weary as the sound of a padded stampeding approached, the foot stepping belonging to three sets of Nike Killshots. He looked behind him to see a collection of college aged men, appearing no older than twenty-five years, all dressed in very casual travelwear; grey sweatpants, loose-fitting tee shirts, and Sony headphones wrapped around their necks like scarves. Their informal uniformity struck him as humorous, though his face remained fixed in its stoney indifference as they began to bombard his wife with their starstruck smiles.

Long before their marriage, Arthur had recognized an unfair order in this strange world, where women like Neeltje possessed an innate, natural-born value—not earned through virtue, nor talent, nor family name, but one which was conferred by their gender-specific system, by the nature of man, by a misogynistic society. She was constantly being exposed to attention she did not want. To him, he regarded the process with the detached lucidity of an appraiser; she was demoted from a warmblooded woman of feeling to inanimate work of fuckable art, which was a barbaric, dehumanizing reduction made by the heavy handed influence of men, entirely guided by their pathetic, visual nature. Her lips were far too enticing, her shoulders were rounded in such a way that invited the male gaze to her plump chest, and the hateful gleam in her gemstone eyes were ignored among these competing features, leaving the rest of her inanimate body to be fed to these dogs. There was no moral consideration in their feast. This was a woman who was at the center of male obsession, and had lived there probably her entire adult life, yet tragically, she was never cherished for the pristine pearl that was her character. The wholeness of her dreams were scattered like ashes into the void of the ocean’s depth, no man caring enough to dive for such a treasure. They’d rather consume the flesh of the oyster in a single gulp, spitting the pearl out with the gritty, sandy remnants.

With tired eyes, he watched the boys imitate the mating ritual of peacocks, meanwhile, each terrible passing flirtation dropped him lower under the current of a wavering fatigue. How tiresome these children were, he thought. The war their fresh faces fought with juvenile acne surprisingly did not serve to soothe his threatened ego, in fact, the undeniable ache of slow-burning jealousy was only fueled, because even though there was not a chance in the world for them, he could see with his mind’s eye what they were thinking… Seeing her in the flesh made them writhe, these vulgar ruminations played like HD pornography as the six eyes consumed her.

He suppressed a sudden nausea as he caught this scene: the three stooges scanning Neeltje and compartmentalizing all of her most lewd features; those wide, breeding hips, her narrow waist, her heavy breasts. It was a ghastly sight to watch another man fuck her in the confines of his mind, where he remained safe with the armor of plausible deniability. Arthur’s eyebrows narrowed at the sight, his sclera glossy with a welling vengeance. He just clenched further, threatening to pulverize any remaining enamel left on his molars.

Her androphobic response was impeccable as always, but this brought him no real sense of relief. It felt like a mere pacifier to a much greater disturbance—he felt as helpless and uncontrolled as the baby in front of him. And what struck him as especially ironic was that Neeltje was not feeling her most beautiful that day, what with her bland make-up and unstyled hair. She did not carry herself with her usual, unpenetrable self-confidence, but rather a quiet self-consciousness that seemed to her very unnatural. She was utterly unaware of the fantastical impact she had on the men that shared lanes in this world that she lived in—unaware that, even on a day she was looking considerably ordinary, they still hungered for her like starving hounds.

“I don’t know how I am expected to behave when other men look at you with such profane eyes.” He muttered, becoming suddenly distant as he was dragged back into the same agitation, only now further poisoned by another potent element. “They were basically fucking you, staring like that.”

He ruminated neurotically on the scene until they had been spat out the other side of metal detection. Neeltje was tragically kept to the side and fondled by a security officer, who stood three inches taller than he and bore a striking resemblance to her ex lover, perhaps a few years his senior. A sickness lodged somewhere between his stomach and throat, prodding him with indecent throbs of possessiveness as he watched the entire process unfold, supposedly to secure safety, though he hardly believed it. He scoffed at that, watching this man press both of his hands against her inner thighs for a second too long. He felt a guttural agony, as if restrained by rope and forced to subject his sight to unspeakable scenes involving her and the disgusting men that breathed her same air.

#maybe.......... im the one that's emo writing today????

His words hung in the air between them, a cruel, heavy accusation that seemed to steal the very breath from the room: They were basically fucking you, staring like that.

She offered a quick, brittle scoff - a desperate, knee-jerk reaction meant to deflect the blow - yet the sentiment seeped directly into her skin, echoing like a somber bell long after his voice fell silent. From her earliest years, the world had refused to leave her innocence intact. Men had drafted unwanted futures for her features before she even understood her own reflection, idly remarking on the lush, full shape of her mouth, casually tallying the trail of broken hearts she would inevitably leave behind, and waiting with horrifying patience for the clock to make her fair game. She had been robbed of a peaceful youth, left instead with a visceral recoil toward any man who mistook her mere existence for an open invitation.

The accusation wounded her to the core because it blamed her for a beauty she had never asked to carry, punishing her for a physique she could not simply shed at will. Yet the bitterest tragedy lay in his own eyes: he looked at her with the exact same consuming, possessive hunger. The only difference, the only shred of dignity she had managed to claw back from a life of unwanted scrutiny, was that she had chosen him. She had opened her heart to his gaze, granting him access where others took by force. In a world that endlessly invaded her boundaries, her final act of agency was deciding who earned passage to her inner world. Allowing a man to adore her was meant to be a sacred gift, an unblemished altar.

Her eyelids fluttered shut, heavy with the crushing weight of an unearned guilt. His outburst might have been meant as chivalry - a protective, burning fire - but it was a fragile, bitter breath that parted her lips into cold air.

“I will always be loyal,” she whispered as she forced herself to meet his eyes. “I hope you know that.”

It was a tragic plea born from the raw scars of past betrayals, a desperate attempt to reassure a man who, so prematurely, could be slipping away. For all the instinctual desire her body commanded, she had never possessed a devotion that wanted to inflict ruin. In her past relationships, she had played the devoted bitch - waiting by the door until the late hours of the night while her lover returned home carrying the cheap, synthetic floral fragrance of another woman. He called her crazy, weaponizing her own mind against her and insisting it was all in her head, but no lie could cover the unmistakable warm scent of recent intimacy on his skin. She had endured the screaming matches, the emotional cruelty, endlessly bleeding out in silence while waiting for her turn to be cherished with the same fervor he offered to strangers.

A sudden, invasive contact shattered her memories as the airport security guard stepped into her personal space. His heavy palm paused near the curve of her thigh during the pat-down, then slid upward, trailing across the small of her back with an unhurried, sickeningly deliberate touch that made her skin crawl. Her entire posture recoiled inward, her shoulders curling to protect her chest. A heartbroken thought took root in the corners of her mind: perhaps Arthur shouldn’t have to carry the exhausting burden of her existence. Perhaps a woman so hopelessly marked by the world, ought to simply fade entirely.

Her fingers trembled as she scooped her belongings from the plastic bin, arriving just in time to catch the guard’s low muffled chuckle to his colleague: “That one with the big tits? She’s definitely not wearing underwear--”

She swallowed the rise of heat in her throat, burying the humiliation deep beneath her ribs. She could not bear to cause another scene; the airport was already a pressure cooker, and Arthur was a live wire of raw, furious tension, his anger radiating through the crowd like heat off asphalt. She fell into step beside him, shrinking her physical presence until she felt almost invisible. Though he walked only inches away, his shoulder brushing hers, he felt light-years removed; leaving her to trail him behind like an afterthought.

She spoke when absolute necessity demanded it, guiding him through the terminal toward their gate with flat, lifeless directions. Her usual composure was entirely gone, replaced by a soul-weary sadness that turned the blinding lights, the blaring boarding announcements, and the chaotic rush of travelers into a distant, painless blur.

Once trapped in her middle seat on the flight to England, she pulled her book to her chest like a shield and hid behind its printed pages, using the story as a fortress against the rest of the cabin. She did not look up as the engines roared to life (her favorite part of the flight) and the ground fell away below them. Only when the pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom to announce their final descent through the gray English clouds did she reach the bottom of the page. Scanning the final words, she let out a long breath, letting the author’s tragic truth echo:

“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.”

Her words landed like another shovelful of coal, which served to stoke his fiery vexation until it seemed that black smoke might pour out of his ears. After that dismissive retort, any friendliness he felt for her turned from a simmering warmth to a violent, scalding sear. Had he not removed himself sooner, he was certain she’d blister from the spitting sparks that spewed from this rage-fueled furnace. Yet, in the end, her refusal to take him seriously came as no surprise.

His discomfort was, to her, little more than an inconvenience. God forbid his feelings should impose upon her in the slightest. He found himself wishing he had kept his mouth shut, smothering the stove’s flame with sand. She had never wanted to hear it in the first place. She could be such an aloof bitch sometimes, he thought.

His thoughts became a frenetic swarm, each thought engulfed by a hundred fire ants, the function of his mind now overtaken and ruled by the red colony. Every attempt to focus was met with another stinging bite. His mind thrashed from one task to the next, desperately trying to outrun the burning stings while keeping them on schedule, determined that no matter what, they would not miss their flight.

When she left the room, he could feel the trail of frost that followed her departure. Yes, she was miffed, but he decided that this could be managed more effectively once they had safely boarded.

He finished packing in complete silence, the quiet of the room acting as an insecticide to the chaotic ant-farm that previously raided his psyche. He folded his clothing in such a way that felt ceremonial, treating the clothing like a person by catering to its unique shape. He took two seconds to marvel at the orientation of his items, and did a final scan to ensure there would be nothing that would cause any delays whilst being screened by security.

After another ten minutes, he emerged from the bedroom with his hair combed and his luggage in hand. “Yes, you’re mad, I know.” He started, seeming ever so slightly calmer, though his speech was still very pressured. Arthur poddled around in the kitchen, palming a slew of pills haphazardly into his mouth and using the hollow of his other palm to fill with tap water. He exuded a strained sigh after swallowing, and then immediately began to sneeze in fits of three.

“This fucking cat!” He growled, eventually locking his allergy-induced, tear-filled eyes on Peper, the current focus of his ire. He walked past the unsuspecting feline, who had been seated on the counter, and as he reached to unplug his device, the mischievous cat whacked him on the arm.

Arthur released a disturbed moan when looking at the time, now 07:00. He then looked at Cornelia, whose expression, even at rest, seemed to issue a silent threat. She looked personally offended by his very existence, and his willful disappearance seemed like an open invitation coming from such an unmoved face. There it was again, her cruel undertones that had a tendency to creep back into existence at the most expected and unexpected of times.

“So… Are you finished packing?” Arthur asked her with a hint of trepidation. The faintest suggestion that he feared her felt like placing every weapon at her feet, peeling away his armor, and kneeling to accept defeat before the battle had even begun. His body language shifted, and became smaller when taking a step away from her, shadowed by his own guilty conscience. He realized he had defied what felt to him like the natural order of his romantic world. Imposing demands upon a queen, to dominate rather than submit, could never produce the outcome he desired. What sort of wretched servant was he, who yearned for servitude, yet continually found himself grappling for mastery over the very woman he wanted to subjugate him?

“I’m a flustered idiot under stress. Please don’t be annoyed by me, I’m awful, just awful.” He said this in a peculiar way, mostly to himself, and walked away to call for a cab.

Before long, they had been delivered to the airport, where crowds congregated and noisy fluctuations of bumbling Belgian salesmen and upset children echoed up into the tall ceilings. It was so unpleasantly stimulating that Arthur had shut off his pleasure receptors entirely. His mind was blank and locked into a structured escape plan, actively calculating the most efficient way to get from point A to Terminal B. Unaware of Cornelia’s familiarity with the kiosk system, he desperately tried to navigate the electronic ticket claiming system while being actively challenged by the Flemish on screen. Duolingo hadn’t prepared him for words like ‘EEN STREEPJESCODE SCANNEN’! He shook his head at his own stupidity when he realized there was an English translation available after the tickets were already in the process of being printed.

Once in hand, he respectfully handed Cornelia hers, and put his own in the pocket of his tweed jacket.

“Does it look as though I am not?”

The question was so utterly absurd it scarcely merited the breath required to answer, though she tossed it back to him with a sliver of dark sarcasm. Slowly, almost indolently, she chewed, letting it drag between them as she drained the final, bitter drop of her mug. Her gaze remained studiously elsewhere. She refused to offer him even the modest charity of her eye contact - finding a stubborn amusement in the mere notion that he believed himself capable of commanding her.

When her eyes finally deigned to give away, bestowing upon him the quiet grace of her sight, her brown was already drawn; furrowed into a delicate knot of mock concern as he muttered his self-deprecations into the void. There was a secret, sparkling joy in watching him unravel.

She set her plate aside, rinsing it under a thin stream of tap water with the knowledge that Maxence would tend to the rest during his visits with Peper. Walking across the room, she paused while Arthur finished his call. The moment his phone slid into his pocket, she leaned in, pressing a soft kiss against the plane of his cheek. It left a crimson stain upon his skin - a mark of ownership she casually buffed away with the pad of her thumb before whispering against his ear: “I love you.”

For all her exasperations, the words bore no deceit. She felt them deeply. Besides, offering love felt vastly more prudent than voicing the alternative - that he was a fucking idiot - which would only fracture the tenuous peace of their journey. Right now, her spirit was content, lulled by the buttery memory of the pastry she’d eaten and the small satisfaction of Peper avenging her against Arthur’s pricklier moods. She loved him, yes, even at the height of his irritation. Two conflicting truths, held softly in the same hand: to adore a man, and to be profoundly irritated by him.

In the quiet interior of the cab, Cornelia’s devotions did not perform; it merely breathed through small, unstudied gestures. She spoke animatedly to the driver in the rich cadence of her native tongue, dissecting recent football matches - both of them shared in the deflated tragedy of Club Bruges falling to Rennes. Yet, even as her voice carried across the front seat, her fingers drifted instinctively to Arthur’s, tracing the line of his knuckles. Her smile had not yet reached him, but her touch held him fast.

Upon their arrival, the world devolved into a muted slapstick comedy. The dramatic, heavy-handed hauling of luggage; the impatient gestures urging her to step faster; the theatrical sighs echoing through the gates. Cornelia merely steered him through the labyrinth of entryways, quietly translating the signage. Every few moments her lips would part to intervene, only to snap shut as she watched him haphazardly stumble into success on his own.

There was a captivating charm in watching him struggle against the currents of her culture. A sly, playful smile curved her lips whenever frustrations pinched his features. It was a sweet retribution for waking her at an hour so ungodly that even the early birds yet to rouse their worms.

What amused her the most, however, was his insistence on tackling the kiosks. In a reasonable world, a single swipe on a smartphone would have sufficed. But given that her husband possessed the soul of a Victorian patriarch, she graciously allowed him to surrender to the kiosks of paper and heated ink.

When the printed passes were finally in hand, she took hers from his grasp and tucked it safely into her leather bag, making her page in The Yellow Wallpaper. It was the Dutch edition; she could not be bothered with English today. She spoke it endlessly in her daily life these days, and this little book will be a stolen fragment of home.

Leaning her warmth softly against his side, her breath brushed his ears in a conspiratorial whisper. “Keep going straight. I imagine you’ll want to get us through security-”

The flat of her hand, holding her book, pressed gently into the small of his back; guiding her reluctant clown forward into the crowd.

The queue for security moved with an agonizing, glacial pacing of a forgotten hour. They shuffled inch by deliberate inch, trapped in a stasis of fluorescent lighting and airport hum. As they waited, the heavy silence was broken by a rowdy, restless energy nearby. A small gaggle of men - traveling bachelors, boastful and brazen - had gravitated into their orbit. The sudden shift in their expression was an instantaneous recognition dawning on their faces as their eyes landed on her. Recognizing Cornelia - the unmistakable, radiant icon from their social feeds - their interest ignited into full-blown excitement. Completely oblivious to Arthur standing beside her, assuming he was merely another passenger in line, they leaned over the stanchions with cocky, flirtatious grins.

“No way -- Neeltje?” one of them beamed, leaning over the barrier with a smirking glance at friends. “I knew this flight was delayed for a reason. Any chance a star like you needs someone to buy her a drink while we wait?"

Cornelia didn’t flinch. A breathtaking smile touched her lips -- dazzling, magnetic, yet laced with an icy poise. She tilted her chin, regarding them not as adoring fans, but unruly children who had forgotten their manners.

“I'm alright,” She replied, her voice an impartial purr that held the edge of a sheathed blade.

“Come on, don’t be like that,” Another chimed in, emboldened by his friends’ snickers. He took a bold step forward, reaching out an audacious hand, aiming to casually settle his palm against the curve of her waist. “We’re just trying to keep you company-”

Before his fingers could even graze the fabric of her blouse, Cornelia’s movement was swift and precise. With a flick of her wrist, she brought the hard edge of her novel down sharply across his reaching forearm - a sting strong enough to send him back flinching backward with a hissed breath.

Her smile never slipped, but her eyes turned into glaciated steel. The warmth in the air evaporated in an instant.

“Touch me again,” she said, her voice dropping into a low whisper that was unsettling, “and you will find out how swiftly I can end your vacation.”

The young man held his reddening forearm, his cocky demeanor completely shattered into panic. Sheepish, terrified nods rippled through the group as they scrambled back into line, thoroughly humiliated.

In one motion, she stepped backwards, planting her spine securely against Arthur’s chest. Her hands reach down, lacing them tightly through his.

The moment the threat dissolved, the icy tension in Cornelia’s frame melted away. She relaxed completely into Arthur’s frame, leaning her head back against his shoulder. Her sternness evaporated as her thumb gently stroked the back of his neck.

“This is exhausting,” she whispered.

The bubbling, combustible passions of the previous night had coolly solidified into molten rock by the time the sun ascended from the eastern horizon.The conclusion of their intimate affair was a dark inference: Arthur was doomed to die as quasiparticles did. He was an exciton, forever doomed to an endless cycle of annihilation and rebirth, gathering his scattered energies after every dissolution only to reconstitute himself for the next inevitable sacrifice. Then, at the whim of her insatiable sexual appetite—which proved to know no reasonable limitations—he would echo this act once more, repeating the ritual within the sensual chamber they called marriage.

Her sexual demands were not a problem, per se, but he found himself admittedly appalled by her gluttonous conduct in the bedroom. She was the same irascible girl both inside and outside their marital duty, and Arthur was beginning to accept that there would be no room for slack performances on his part—he genuinely feared that if he failed to bring her to orgasm, she might lash out, withdraw from him, withhold certain rights, or worse. The power at play here was making a home in her palm, and with ease she could close her claws around it and suffocate it. In other words, the pressure between them had somehow become even more unbearable, despite the many times they'd already found release, and he suspected that she would unapologetically abuse this.

To him, the ever-looming threat that Cornelia was had become as essential to him as clean water. Existing without this pressure conceptually was, to him, a quintessential boredom. While some men needed to escape into the fantasy of role-play or fetishism in order to maintain a dwindling excitement for their partner, Arthur denounced any need for theatrical performance, and denied the existence of any personal niches—lolita school-girl, leathery dominatrix, the submissive kitten—Cornelia was the paragon in his paradise. She was, with all intents and purposes, a succubus who bore the magical skill of donning any mask and forcing any role to become completely her own; a supersensual display of perfection and evolution.

The poor decisions from last night manifested in the form of a dull headache. He opened his eyes and grimaced as the rays of sunshine broke in through the window, totally assaulting his pale vision with their crisp whiteness. His head turned to see Cornelia’s bare back a forearm’s distance beside him, and all reality came crashing in around him, as if failed by God when caravaning through the parted Red Sea. He searched for his phone and was unable to locate the device in the bed. It was not at the bedside, either. Suspecting it was left in his pants pocket, he agitatingly slipped from the tangled bedsheets to search for it, and eventually happened upon it in the living room, resting on the coffee table beside a rancid sandwich, which was half eaten by Neeltje’s feline. He unlocked his screen to find that only 5% of his battery remained. The time read 06:07.

“Oh, Christ…” He grumbled aloud, plugging it into a nearby USB-C and immediately rushing to prepare for their flight, which was scheduled to depart at 09:15 that morning. He dumped the oil-soaked bread and remaining internal organs of the sandwich into the rubbish bin, and placed the greasy plate into the sink (which already housed an overabundance of silverware) before rushing back to the bedroom to wake Cornelia, who seemed entirely swaddled by sleep’s heavy blanket. Seeing as she was completely unconscious, he decided to stall. Rather, in an Olympic effort to make the best use of this limited time, he took a shower that lasted no more than five minutes, became manic trying to locate his toothbrush, and eventually dressed himself within these twenty minutes. By the time he had accomplished all of this, he was stupefied by Cornelia’s complete stillness. Was she dead?

He felt the heat of frustration clouding his usual, pure adoration for her. Did she not wake naturally most mornings, he wondered? This was astonishing to him, who woke up without the aid of an alarm quite routinely at six o’clock each morning, since his teenagehood, without fail. The seven minute lapse was an anomaly blamed entirely on the impression of alcohol. But this display of leisure was offensive to him—was he expected to be the only one in this relationship to endure the brunt of life’s stressors?

Seeing as she remained a bump on a lump on a log, he towered over her side of the bed with his arms crossed, watching her breathe shallowly without a care in the world. “Neeltje.” He said, which caused a stir but no wakefulness. “Neeltje,” He said again, which yielded a similar result. “Hey!” He raised his voice, gently shaking her shoulder. “Honestly, how are you still sleeping?!” Finally, the snappy tone escaped him, and Cornelia’s first impression of the day was sullied.

He looked at his timepiece and displayed it to her face. “We have a flight in under two hours from now,” Arthur took her phone from the bedside table and tried to unlock it, but failed because he hadn’t a clue what her passcode was. “Call your brother right now and tell him he needs to look after Peper in our absence, and you also need to pack—Oh what hell! I will pack for us both if you won’t.” He exclaimed, tossing her phone onto the blanket and walking away, beginning to meticulously fold his own things and stuff them into his suitcase. He withdrew a bottle of medication and his hair comb, throwing both of them onto the floor with the intent of using them later, only to be caught up in the frenzy of unearthing his passport somewhere in the fold of his luggage.

“No sense of urgency whatsoever…” Arthur mumbled quietly to himself while aggressively fighting with the luggage’s zipper.

The remainder of the evening drifted on a high, intoxicating cloud. Cornelia carried a sweet, languid exhaustion in her marrow - a relentless, seductive fatigue that refused to leave her bones. It was taxing, certainly, but she surrendered to it with a decadent grace. She was well aware that her appetite was immense, bordering on the gluttonous, yet she was an exquisite lover; beneath her hands, pleasure required no labor, only the absolute freedom of creative liberty. That night, she slept bound in the golden spell of satisfied desire, enveloped by the plush warmth of her sheets and the comforting, shared presence of the man she loved.

Here, the jagged fault lines between them began to show their first real marital strain. Corneli was, by nature, a creature of deep, inviolable slumber - a sleeping beauty whose rest was never to be compromised! Her internal clock pulses to erratic, nocturnal ticks. Some mornings, she stirred early, but more often she surfaced just before noon. She was never meant for the morning, nor did she ever intend to adapt to it; her life truly began long after midday and tapered off into the silent hours of dawn.

Deep in that oblivion, she was dreaming of a frantic, smoke-filled kitchen, consumed by the sheer catastrophe of a burnt lamb roast. Her fitful mind wrestled with the specter of Gordon Ramsay looming over her, forcing exaggerated groans of dismay and whimpering woes from her lips. But the cutting edge of her own name shattered the illusion. Her eyes fluttered open to find Arthur standing over her - and with such a tone, a spiteful, biting tone that grated against her soft subconscious. Bracing herself on her forearms, her face wrinkled in a bleary confusion, she absorbed the venom in his voice, considered it, and offered her response in a voice soft, beautiful, and utterly lethal:

"Arthur," she rasped, her voice thick with sleep and disdain, "lower your voice."

She collapsed back down, bare and unbothered, rubbing the stubborn sleep from her eyes with a slow, agonizing stretch. A heavy yawn spilled from her lips as she tossed back her tangled hair and reached for the robe discarded on the floor.

"If you speak to me like that again, I'm going back to sleep and you can fly to London by yourself." In her waking daze, she lacked the energy for the crueler retort, so she chose the exquisite weapon of indifference. Spite made her ignore her phone. Peper had an automatic feeder, after all; the cat would survive, even if Arthur’s frayed nerves wouldn’t.

She drifted out of the room to prepare for their flight, the absurdity of his panic swelling inside her. In truth, the airport was a stone’s throw away; time was abundantly on their side. Yet, feeling the furious coil of tension raiding off Arthur, she made a rare, resentful concession by trimming her routine. Every saved second felt like a sacrifice of her self-expression. She kept her makeup bare and simple, flattened her hair into an uninspired bun, and traded contact lenses for thick glasses simply because he couldn’t spare the extra two minutes it took to insert them. She despised the reflection in the mirror - it felt terribly, unforgivably plain - but she was trying. Trying, she emphasized to herself, the word tasting bitter on her tongue.

Returning to the bedroom, she paused, her chest tightening with prickling annoyance as she observed Arthur. He was a frantic, sightless blur, pacing and spinning in a ridiculous relay race; it was like watching a desperate Roadrunner try to outmaneuver a coyote. It was utterly exasperating! Her gaze dropped to the bedroom floor, where the comb and medication lay scattered like debris. Her brows furrowed sharply. What a melodramatic display, she thought, the sheer senselessness of it infuriating her when a perfectly good nightstand sat mere centimeters away. Her fingers twitched with the urge to pick them up and put them where they belonged, but she checked herself, letting out a dismissive huff and letting the mess rot on the carpet.

No words were offered to bridge the suffocating silence. She pulled her luggage from the closet and began to pack with a slow defiant motion. Intimates, dresses, basic toiletries - she tossed them in lazily refusing to match his mania. Whatever she forgot, she could easily buy in England; the world was familiar territory and she refused to let his anxiety turn her life into a fire drill. With agonizing precision, she retrieved her passport and extra paperwork from the dresser. She was a seasoned traveler; his frantic dance was amateur hour, and it was wearing her thin.

Rolling her suitcase into the living room, she slipped her ring back onto her finger, snatched her car keys, and set a cup of coffee to brew, taking a long breath of the quiet air. As she waited for Arthur to finish his frantic performance, she sank back into the couch, opened her phone, and finally fired off a text to her brother to watch the cat (receiving a prompt, unbothered thumbs-up in return).

She set the screen down and began to slowly, mindlessly chew a pastry, sipping her coffee while staring at the blank canvas of the wall. She sat in serene repose - her annoyance simmering beneath a calm exterior, waiting for whatever fiery, self-righteous sermon Arthur would preach next, fully prepared to douse it in flames.

Her touch alone cursed him by returning him to a state of juvenile insecurity. It was like being touched for the very first time, subjecting the virgin he used to be to the overwhelming introductory scene, such as a harem. Neeltje’s effortless familiarity with the eros demanded a certain respect, and while he did feel comfortable with his level of sexual competence, his nerves writhed in her presence. Her aura was strong enough to whack him repeatedly with the hot hand of self-doubt, all the while serving to inflate her own dominant potency. The pads of her fingers against his chest were like knives suspended from a string, the angle of her manicured tips whipping his being into sobriety with their sharp tracings. All of it was deliciously foreign, exciting, and new—they still were ignorant to the many secrets their bodies held from each other, after all, the journey to discovery had only launched into its maiden voyage eight hours ago.

Working alongside her for so many months had limited their ability to physically proximate to one another, mostly due to a fear of potentially crossing a professional boundary—this chapter lasted unbearably long, and his ability to remain temperate was like a rigorous exercise in self-restraint. It took immense discipline for him to resist the ugly urges he felt so often. He felt this quite strongly when she would carelessly parade around in revealing loungewear, seeing him as no more a threat to her than her own shadow; or when she’d arrive home very late and he’d catch a glimpse of her from his window, dressed in an exposing ensemble and skin fairydusted with the glow of liquor. Arthur felt as though he could see the imprint of every man who had the luxury of touching her. Her hazy eyes were totally unaware of the feminine powers she possessed, the many men she had killed with just one look. She was a total femme fatale, and he was not a perfect gentleman! He had many indecent thoughts, he had done disgusting acts behind closed doors, all before he’d even entered her romantic orbit.

He recalled Neeltje’s refusal to douse her strong personality—looking back, he supposed she might have had a similar gripe with him upon meeting. He had guarded himself well in the very beginning, but his strength dwindled steadily during his time in Belgium. Day one, he was oddly stimulated by her depraved threats and thoughtless cursing at him. After three months, he had accepted the embarrassing fact that he was developing a proper crush on her. By six months, he had capitulated to his love for her. By eight months, he felt punished. And, somewhere along the way, something inside of her had changed. But what?

These ruminations made her question feel all the more absurd once it finally had the audacity to meet existence. “Insignificant?” He repeated, eyes wide and unsettled. “Too ordinary?” Arthur then repeated with even more an emphatic cry—this was almost too comical a concept coming from her! Out of him escaped a laugh half-filled with quivering air, he simply couldn’t suppress it, for the fears she had apprehensively shared were ludicrous and wildly imaginative.

His palms found the widest points of her hips, and in them he sank his fingertips deeply to ease the sudden influx of covetous wanting. The soft, pliable warmth of her skin brought life back into the cool digits of his hands; they were haunted by a constant numbness when the itch to touch her was not sanctioned. Months worth of an unreachable itch finally scratched, released at once as a colossal wave of vibrational intensity.

“I’m sorry for laughing, but to call you ordinary would be a desperate reach. It’s possibly the last word I’d use to describe you.” He replied genuinely, though still felt influenced by the reshaped atmosphere that followed Cornelia’s transparency. He felt weary of seeing her in such a fragile state, it worked him up in an unexpected way. The inherent intimacy found in her sharing raw emotion had carried their relationship across a threshold into uncharted territory—territory he wanted to navigate with her, not against her.

“It just surprises me, is all… Because I find you to be a very unusual woman.”He went on, his eyes bedecked with growing fascination as he looked upward at her assailable expression, now seemingly being invited to indulge her with his obsession. His avaricious hands climbed up her back until one was comfortably nested in her hair, and the other found vacancy at the small of her back. “You are certainly not absent of friction. You make men nervous because of your unpredictable way of being, you are a professional nightmare because of your wishy-washiness. You are not effortlessly polite, and you fail to be kind often. I’m not left wanting for that woman! That wouldn’t be you.” He lost his breath whilst worshipping those eyes, like freshly mined peridot. “You are unforgiving, you are incapable of being mild in any sense of the word, and you drive me absolutely mad. I cannot stand you half of the time, and yet…” His hand found her precious cheek, its coolness reminded him of a spring peach.

“I enjoy neither knowing for certain if I am condemned or freed by you. I don’t appreciate falsehoods. I find most women tiresome because of their endless need for validation. It’s your stony, unreadable smile that keeps me so transfixed by you, Neeltje.” He confessed, pulling her in so that he could feel her breath on him, endorsing his statements by pairing them with a more intense closeness. “I am fatally smothered by this love I have.” Arthur pressed his lips to hers, but with the gentle pressure of his grip pulling the base of her hair, he influenced her head to tilt upward at him. He parted from their locked kiss and looked at the rare exhibition of submission.

“I watched myself die for you again and again, and each time I did a newer, stronger love was resurrected. I don’t see any reason for this pattern to yield a different result… I need to live with you, and I need to die with you. What else is there in this miserable life?”

There was enough breath in the air to declare Arthur a master of his own theatrical absurdity. Neeltje had never met a man as vividly raw, as vibrantly ruddy with emotions. It was fair to admit he lacked neither passion nor expression, and the sheer, unfiltered scale of it all fascinated her completely. She felt so drawn to his histrionics that she instinctively wanted to step onto his stage and play her part! At first, those deep, charged currents of affection had remained submerged beneath their usual cool detachment. She was merely curious, finding his eccentricities a rare diversion in a world populated by the unbearably chaste and the insufferably mundane. He was simply the sweet bonbon meant to be saved for the very end, but he became her most favorite flavor.

Yes, she had been profoundly oblivious, hazed by her own ego, barely noticing the steady blossoming of devotion between them during their stolen time. Wrapped tightly in her own world, she had ignored the growing wound that Arthur bled from day after day. Yet, she was intensely aware when she was the object of desire - she adored the absolute power it gave her. She moved around him like a delicate prey, prancing just outside his reach, teasing him with every glance and shift of fabric, letting him smell the heavy, sweet promise of her flesh during their single afternoon. She watched those dull eyes drinking her in, drinking in the way her skin jostled, the way his knuckles flexed with the urge to grab her, the way his Adam's apple bobbed when she spoke. He was entirely right for her, perfect in his imperfections. Still, their little problem of disagreement remained unsolved - but she relished the dangerous thrill of a man who dared to challenge her. Every other man simply folded, whispering insults in the dark or texting their exhaustion with her games. Not Arthur. He stirred the darkest, most chaotic currents within her, and the pleasure of it was tremendous.

“That did not make me feel any better…” she murmured, as she pulled back from the hollow of his collarbone, her eyes inherently rolled as his laughter broke the heavy air.

That was Arthur Melbourne in a nutshell - always the actor. It felt dangerously too soon to bare such raw, vulnerable pieces of her soul to anyone, let alone him. Yes, she was a complicated creature, a “bitch” as they called her, but even a bitch possessed a heart that bruised! A shifting discomfort tightened in her chest, an urge to yell at him for seeing too much. This was entirely new territory for her: stripping away her pretty petals to find them bruised under each layer, finding fault within herself for the first time, realizing she was not the untouchable, perfect deity she pretended to be.

And with complexity, she was.

Every word he spoke felt like a sharp arrow piercing her ribs. It continuously stabbed, wounding her, leaving her to bleed, and bleed, and bleed. But these were not the cruel, clean shafts of a huntsman bringing down prey. No, these were the golden arrows of Eros, tipped with a sweet poison that infiltrated her veins with inescapable love. The disdain that had begun to cloud her eyes evaporated, replaced by an incandescent warmth. While any other woman would have required careful handling and delicate flattery, Neeltje, the creature who despises ordinary compliments, was able to take this. This brutal honesty was her whispers of foreplay - the act of laying her flaws bare, only for him to worship at the altar of her mess.

The way her cheek pressed into his palm, feeling the radiating heat of his skin, was a narcotic comfort. He belonged to her, entirely and without question. She would be damned if any other woman could ever bring such delight to his senses, or command such a fever pitch within him. Never in her life had she cared so deeply for a man; she never thought she would see the day. She had always viewed them as fickle, disposable things, but Arthur? She wanted to care for him because…well, she loved him. So completely that it felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, defenseless and dizzy. Every heartbeat seemed to whisper his name, and every soft glance from him felt like coming home. To hold him, to be ease his burden, to be the sanctuary where he could rest - that was the only thing that mattered to her. The words felt heavy and foreign in her mind, terrifying in their magnitude.

Caught in the fierce current of her own realization, she felt the sudden wetness emerge. She despised crying, yet this overwhelming tidal wave of realization brought a gentle stream of tears coursing down her cheek. They might have been conveyed by others as tears of hurt, but in truth, they were the purest nectar of genuine admiration. If this is what love is - this raw, gentle, shattering surrender - then she had fallen completely, drowning in him. What a magnificent, foolish, and absolute thing this love was.

He had finally rendered her speechless, this woman who always had the last word! Her lips parted to find a phrase to say, instead, it trembled, and a soft, involuntary sound - part sigh, part teasing moan - escaped her, a subconscious surrender to the dominance of his affection with the gentle tug of her hair. When their kiss finally broke, her lips chased his warmth, her body arching with a desperate need that was becoming all too familiar. Just the slightest touch from him was enough to drive her to the very brink of madness, a willing sacrifice to the devotion he embodied.

“Nothing,” she whispered, a breathless smile playing at the corners of her trembling lips as she pulled him back down into the heat of her mouth. “There is nothing else at all.”

His confession that he needed to live with her, and to die with her, drowning in the very chaos she created, stirred her. Neeltje looked at him, her chest heaving as her hands slipped up to grip his shoulder, her eyes glassy and heavy with a passion that mirrored his own.

Though words were not her weapon in this moment, her body spoke a much more dangerous dialect. She didn’t bother trying to match his grand speech; instead, her fingertips traced a slow, lingering descent down his chest before she pushed herself off and escaped like a nymph plunging into the woods. Every step she took was an unhurried rhythm until she reached the bedroom. She lingered there, her spine pressed against the dark wood of the doorframe as she glanced over her shoulder.

“Let’s see if you can die for me all over again,” she teased with an invitation, her voice thick with a demanding promise as her teeth caught her lower lip, daring him to cross and claim her.

shisasan

I want to infect you with the tremendous excitement of living, because I believe that you have the strength to bear it.

Tennessee Williams, The Selected Letters, Vol. 1: 1920-1945

Arthur had been simply floating along this boozy river, colliding gently with whatever insignificant notions his neurons conjured, until he was whisked away by yet another current. It was a stream of thoughtless thoughts that came effortlessly flowing, none of which seeming to abide by reason, purpose, or destination.

What could not be found in reason, however, he found in emotionalism. He was weaving between happiness and a strange brand of melancholy, both which were mercilessly imparted on him by the uncontrolled nature of his subconsciousness. He lied languidly on his side, caught in a loop of indecisiveness about whether the dizziness was aided by opening or shutting his eyes.

The major happenings of the day were an inevitable and recurring theme. Thinking about their relationship was entirely unavoidable even in this state of intoxication. Their unusualness tolled like an iron bell within the encasement of his ribs. Arthur was the antithesis to Cornelia—their chemistry routinely defied odds, hardly making sense to even him.

She was unserious, lived to feed her fickle desires, and stood apart as a Maverick of sorts in her ability to command attention as a woman. He had witnessed her be both ambivalent and anxious in her attachment style depending on the lover, who Arthur assumed were treated as an interchangeable selection of toys served to amuse her childish caprices. He, on the other hand, was chronically somber, dwelled ridiculously about unimportant matters, and was under the thumb of his emotional volatility. In this context, he had fallen in love far too easily, committed himself to far too much too quickly; it was his weakness as a man. He was, put simply, asinine at times. It was asinine because of the preposterous notion that devotion could be given without certainty. Her capacity to be simultaneously despotic and soft was paradoxical; he grovelled at the feet of this woman who tucked him into a soft bed of sheets at night.

A perfect horror consumed him as he was reminded that, despite the societal seriousness of marriage, that human nature would always prevail, and she could be taken by another lover if there was any willingness in her heart despite him. He crumbled into a bed of rust at the thought.

The offensive sound of a blade on wood woke his senses, the noise being disproportionately loud against the sensitive ears of a drunk. His eyes widened, and he realized that for an indiscernible amount of time, he had drifted into a state of half-sleep whilst dreaming of his wife’s intriguing duality. He sat back up with a newfound acceptance of his weird consciousness. Arthur speculated briefly on whether he enjoyed this drunkenness, but was quickly distracted by the return of a blonde angel and a sandwich that looked too beautifully assembled to eat.

It took no time at all for Arthur to observe the cameo head perfection; complete with a sloped nose, wide eyelids, and masterfully etched lips. His dull gaze was no match for her serpentine eyes. She was not born, but crafted with romantic genius, sculpted perfectly for him to stimulate the darkest senses. Her features were adorably soft yet proved capable of such hardness, offering a severity that depended greatly on the subtle shifts of her polar moods. The contrast totally delighted him, as it kept him in a state of guessing with her; womanly tenderness paired with tyrannical ferocity. Her face was a mirror to her soul, and although Arthur did not consider himself to be a man of many important skills, he had a collection of small strengths, and reading her face had become one of them.

The soft glow of the kitchen light drained into the living space, which casted rounded shadows against the curves of her hips. The concave valley of her sternum was subject to unrest by the faint jossling of her breasts as she walked, which he just now had noticed were so divinely wrapped in her party dress. What an impeccable convex display of femininity, he thought. And although her body was the true ideal, he could sense that upon her face she wore mild unease.

“Thank you.” He said, his voice having sloped back into a more usual tone. “You’re incapable of making any meal simple.” Arthur said as a compliment. It was a very valuable skill for her to have, since he, a man who ate out of necessity and hardly for pleasure, would avoid cooking until he was on the verge of hunger pains. He concluded that this burden in life would no longer befall him, considering he had acquired a wife so skilled in her craft.

And in his usual, annoying way, he did not reach for the food at all. This was a frustration familiar to anyone who prepared a meal: food served fresh was meant to be eaten as such. To leave it untouched, as though the time between serving and eating had no bearing on the experience, was lunacy. In his defence, it could not be considered loitering since he did have a genuine purpose for his tarrying. He was mesmerized by her sitting beside him, his eyes were soft as he drank the sacrosanct vision whole. Her bleached hair, the small blemish on her skin, the little ‘imperfections’ deemed unsightly by society—it only added to her natural, raw grace. Still, he could hardly believe that this good thing had happened to him, that finally, he got what he wanted.

He had tried to act unaware of the low vibrations that emitted from her position, but it was impossible to disregard the contrite expression plainly worn on her face. All light fled him, and his heart throbbed stiffly in such a way that compressed a huff of air from his lungs. Had he believed in a god, he would be praying that she was not angry with him over some drunken, trite comment he made. It was too soon for divorce, but not too soon for annulment.

“You seem bothered.” Arthur finally said in a slightly lower register, his eyes narrowing as his eye fixed on her with more intent. “Why are you upset?” And don’t pretend you aren’t.