SLOW REVEAL - excerpt

Through the living room curtain she looked out and noticed how the fog had lifted. A shadow of the Japanese cherry tree fell across the field of snow. The moonlight was narcotic. She could lie beneath the window sash and sleep it off if it weren’t for the clanking radiator jerking her from the nightmare she wished had only been a bad dream. With the burden of an uncertain future weighing her down, she moved languidly through the house, unpacking her bag as she went, dropping socks, boxers and a starched white shirt on the wide plank floors. Without undressing she crawled into bed and lay there praying for sleep but the words by which she lived terrorized her like a dissident, forced to give up country and citizenship, having been censored for too many years.

I want to reach the sky of you and never plateau,
To reach the high of you and never land.

She clapped her hands to her ears as if it were the sound of the words and not the thoughts that hurt. The comforter wrapped around her had once cushioned the cries of love. Those cries, she could still hear them but now they sounded like bitter anguish. Anguish and ecstasy separated by a fine line between the paramour and the vanquished. I don’t love you anymore, she swore in silence, wearing the lie like armor. I won’t love you, she conceded the truth.