Pain
She got the cheese out of the cupboard. There was no limit to her grief. She put the cheese on a plate. If she let go of her grief, her tears would never stop. She got out a knife. He had made that knife. It would never lose its edge.
Her blood would be very red on the edge of that knife. Crimson pearls on silver… like precious jewels…
Nothing was precious anymore.
Music drifted into the room from down the road.
She picked up the tray. She forced a smile. Mahtan, her father, was waiting in the living room.
oooOooo
“Well, at least you have kept your figure,” the Vanya told her. “Even if you did not keep your sons.”
It was not the arrogance of that comment that hurt her.
It was how off-handedly the shape of her life, and her love, were wiped away.
Unconsciously, her hand crept to the gentle swell of her belly. She caressed her womb, trying to rediscover the shapes of her sons in it, the way they had ripened within her, safe and sound, before life and their father had ripped them away from her.
“Yes,” she replied. “That, at least, I kept.”