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Eat it, you fucking pig, eat it.
But she cannot. The atoms of her will not allow it. She was not built to
allow it. She grimaces. His blood wells up under her nails. It will leave a
scar. It will leave a scar and maybe that will be enough. For the next one. To
make her understand. The way the last one made her understand. She will
see a wound shaped like a woman’s nails in her husband’s neck and she will
wonder. A neck that should be smooth and kind because the world knows
no suffering yet.
Does he feel it? Does he see? Her breath comes quick and fractured.
“Eat, darling,” she says through a frozen, devoted, perfect smile. “Your
pie is getting cold.”
Adam closes his hands on her throat. He kicks the plate away. It bursts
into pieces against the door.
“I love you,” Sophia wheezes, and she does. She loves him so much and
she keeps loving him right up until the moment when her pupils blow out
and it all burns away, the parks and the pools and the roses in the window
boxes and the animals and the wide, generous streets and the amphitheater
and the lions yawning on the grass next door beside the silvery fish and the
clever minks and the lazy lambs and the busy bees in the market and the
roof shingles in Gevurah Grey and the walls of the house that was hers in
Innocence. The long stark gate and the desert beyond and that lone and
lonely tree bending so low its fruits touch the hungry, waiting earth. Her
great soft bed like an inland sea, her great grand mirror like a quiet friend,
her sad little soap molds and half-empty pie plate and the bowl of wilted
orange roses, white chrysanthemums, and three bright fuchsia hibiscus
branches teetering on the edge of the table, frozen in space, about to tumble,
about to fall.
The dear, familiar, adored shape of him receding into a gulp of
blackness.
It all burns away and the ashes slip from her fingers and she can never
love anything ever again.