The Ditch

a story

The last bell chimed and threw open the curtain to the hailstorm outside this dwelling; the roof was collapsing and time’s stamp of disdain haunted Dolores each step she took to the cavernous hut outside, where the goats wailed songs of discontent, pleading for mercy. She milked the last one and sat atop the stool. Exhausted from labor; in love with merry fevers she once had in the night. The sweat of her sweet escape pounding the doorposts of love and her husband at last revived within the confines of a hospital bed. Alone atop the stool she thought of the longing within her breast, to give milk again to her own children. The clocktower chimed once again and she knew she must leave.

The day was hastening on and the roof would collapse soon. Perhaps it would bear the burden of marriage and fall in just the same way her sister’s divorce had been planned from the beginning of time. Only now she had to reconstruct what it meant to have a home from the fragmented pieces of her dying love, constrained to that bed, with doctors and nurses reviving each second of his agonizing body unto life’s eternal flame. “It burns brightest towards the end,” she thought, “and once it’s over, I too shall depart with it.”

She got into her car and drove, the way a worm wiggles from the ground when once it has rained. It knows the way without being told; she, too, knew the way without having to be told. Her hair flew as a sundress against the breeze of the open window. Only this time, the car hit the building of respite and landed squarely upon a fragrance of ghosts and laughter. She wrecked. But she wouldn’t call it that, no, she would call it salvation.

The time for all of her troubles came near an end in the ditch. The hail from the storm caught between blades of grass befit of the finest flower. She stumbled out of the vehicle like dew meandering through silken scarlet scarves, sunk deeply into fabric, escaping as through honeyed dreams turned white with yearning. And at last, though not long enough, at the age of ninety-and-two, her husband would receive the call, “Sir, you’re unwell, and you’ll have to be released into hospice. We must do this, or else allow you to leave the premises under penalty that your insurance cannot afford your life with us anymore,” which would be the golden ratio of politeness to mendacity — and all while Dolores wept, trapped beneath the frame of ignorance’s dependency upon truth. Death leaves us all in want, she thought, with no mercy to become a new wish for brighter glories.