Young Writers Society

Vision Clouded by Honey

Disembodied words and images, visages of a melancholy past, happlessly tumble around the confines of the woman’s skull. For the first time in her life, the woman did not react the way that is expected of her, the way that is proper. The front chamber. Marble floor accented by cream colored walls. Gold leafing lining the baseboards. Rich red curtains drape without a care over frosted glass. Money makes itself known in the room’s furnishings. A man and woman. Opulence practically drips from the silk and taffeta of the women’s gown and the crisp suit of the man. High voices and harsh words trill and fill the chamber, embed themselves in the air, making it weigh heavy upon the room’s occupants. A slap echoes. The woman flinches away. Fingers delicately brush over her abused cheek, the woman’s fists coil, hissing like snakes, bruised dignity putrefies, fills the woman to the brim with rage of which she is not accustomed to. A placid face twists, rage hazes and mists, suddenly, a door flies open, feet pound the ground and she is missed. Her tongue thrusts against her cheek, seeking asylum in a new cavern lacking the curdled words that had been festering for ages in the woman's throat. Her actions were not proper, she is not proper. Pale feet not used to this amount of motion pound the grass rhythmically, a private dance performed just for her own pleasure. Sudden motion had taken over where there was once silence and cobwebs. A throaty scream bubbles up. Stretches of years spent in solitude with suffocating satin wrapped around her uninspiring form, alone in a crowd, never needed. Words never heeded, ambitions dead and laid upon the altar for her wedding night. The woman’s words died with the years spent in the limelight of a washed out husband born and bred in a washed out family complete with washed out brothers and sisters. Everything and everyone diluted by their own opulence and smothered in the stifling air of their own stale thoughts. Voices shout and cry words beyond the woman’s comprehension in the bowels of her brain. After so long in the solitude, the solitude that soaked bone deep, the solitude that silenced her very soul, the voices are nearly a relief, a balm for her frayed nerves. Air punches itself in and out of her mouth against her will. She wants to continue to run until she finds the end’s of the earth. She had previously found such desires trivial, when in the man’s house, but now a sense of freedom flooded the woman's veins and left her soaring in the possibilities of being able to want shamelessly. Suddenly a shout. Eyes previously shut in the exhilaration of it all flew open, previous thoughts soaring to graze the low hanging clouds above, as a familiar visage was sighted. One of a living contradiction: warm countenance, yet calculating intentions. The man is clothed immaculately in a suit and lavish loafers. Honey drenched eyes glow golden brown staring into hers as he stalks closer, and an almost perceivable oder all too familiar, all too enticing, wrapped around the woman in that moment. It was those eyes she fell for, and the safety they promised, the same sort of security one can find in the depths of a coffin or a doll of fine china can discover stowed away in an attic. Now she can at last recognize the emptiness, the utter lack of substance within the depths of them. Now the man is nothing, nothing but another horrid example of the women’s inability to follow her own path, decide and guide herself to the happily ever after that always lingers just over the horizon. The woman reminds herself of her new found freedom. Her utter disdain at thoughts of returning to the suffocating silence, forever seated next to the cause of her misfortune. Continuing to look into his deceptively blank eyes, the rest of her vision engrossed by the up, down, up, down motion of her husband's jaw as words spilled from his lips, she can feel the malice of them buried under the buzzing in the women’s head. Phrases continue to drip and descend into from the man’s bloodless lips but their meaning seems inconsequential now. Devoid of feeling. Of emotion. She realizes now they always were.