by Shawn Huelle
Not thinking twice, she nipped off the head of the small intruder, which peeped. She sat all afternoon then, pondering her abrupt, but not uncalled for act of what some might call violence, others mercy. She sat first in the kitchen, then in the front room, finally on the stool in the pantry, lacing her fingers together, flexing them, thinking about her dexterity.
Later in the evening—an hour after a dinner of roasted parsnips and squab, over which her husband, for certain, private reasons, had openly wept—as she sat in the rocking chair in her bedroom knitting, she remembered a moment from her youth, a moment of indescribably brevity, a look her father had given her after watching her snatch a bee from its flight.
She went to bed, pulled her cap over her eyebrows, her quilt over her mouth, slept, and dreamt the following page of text from a novel, the title of which remained obscure:
again took a step toward the unmoved and seemingly immobile Lord Ratchetton. Her breath stuck in her throat as she realized she was now finally close enough to him to apphrehend his scent. She feared what it might do to her and so held her breath.
If Lord Ratchetton noticed Sheila's nervousness, he made no sign. He remained standing in front of her, stoic and stony as only a man of his breeding and position might. Eventually, he saw her pinken, then redden. She fainted. Lord Ratchetton took one step forward, and caught her about the waist.
Later, after they were married, she would tell a story about how she was revived by a bright, clean smell. Her audience usually smiled politely or congratulated her again on her great good fortune. She always discreetly omitted the detail that her second sensation upon reawakening was one of simultaneously having her neck scrubbed with bristles and being unbuttoned—a sensation to which she gladly abandoned herself. Her audience, however, already
She awoke exactly eight hours later in the same position in which she had fallen asleep. She opened her eyes, and thought of her father, a small toad she had once kept as a pet, a cup of coffee, her mother’s corset, and her husband—in that order. She got out of bed and went to her husband’s room only to find that not only was he not there, but his bed showed no signs of having been slept in. This did not disturb her in any conventional or expected sense. Instead, it made her think again of the corset.
