The Wife's Sword

Alice has spent years being the bearer of all her husband’s secrets. She had been the model housewife and mother to the model successful husband and model perfect children. She has put a brave face on it all, listened, soothed and reasoned. She has held her head high above rumours and gossip, remaining herself as white and pure as snow.
But then came the final straw to break her back. And now she sits in a late night café, nursing a lukewarm milky tea served in a blue and white striped cup with a large chip in its handle. It sits in her belly, making her feel sick like some gluttonous child who has indulged in too much rich dessert after an elephantine meal. This milky feeling, for want of some better description, sat in her throat; this, mixed with the thoughts swimming in her head, make her feel certain she would have to run to the none-too-alluring ladies room she could see in the window-come-mirror she faces.
I remember, she thinks with nostalgia, the first time I met his mother she served me tea. In her small living room which he would later come to shun, as he did all the things associated with his past life, his less successful, more honest life. Even then he was ashamed of his humble roots. As we sat there at that first meeting he seemed to cringe each time he looked at that woman, that kind sweet woman who had brought him up, giving up all she had for him, he seems to like his women that way. Did he know back then that he would inadvertently make me into her? That the perfectly preened woman would come to resembled the woman sat slightly faded and musty, like old clothes kept in wardrobe, would come to resemble that frail woman whose slightly wrinkled hands shook just ever so slightly as she handed me my tea in the delicate but cheap china cup. How could he have done?
He thinks, she thinks, that I have let myself go. That was his justification for his actions. His actions had pushed her further down the spiral she had been descending. Descending for some years now. As she spun down, she sees memories of her married life.
All those memories feel traitorous. They seem to come alive to her. Each memory is a photograph; she stood with her children and husband, his arm around her and one hand on their boys shoulder. The people in the pictures moved and smiled and then suddenly she screamed out to the photographer ‘Stop this, I don’t want it, stop….’ It all becomes too much for Alice. She bolts to the toilets.  
The action of being sick seemed to purge her of some of her emotions. At least she felt calmer, or did she mean weak? She observes herself in the mirror, which she couldn’t help noting needed a good clean, then again it could be that her skin had turned a none to healthy shade of grey. Her eyes were watering from having vomited so violently, her mascara was lying in blotches below her eyelashes, hardening and cracking as she blinked, and her eyes look shockingly blue. The dim light, due to one broken lamp and another flickering, did nothing to improve her mood. As she leaves the toilets she meets the disapproving eye of the young waitress. This look makes her feel uncomfortable. She orders another tea.
She is not the normal clientele of this sort of venue. She feels like some horrid cliché. Her fur coat and tousled hair make her look like some character from the sorts of film she normally turns over as she waits for her husband to return home late on a Friday night. Then her predicament was a cliché. Her husband could not even deviate from the norm in that sense. The pink, soft, bulging worms appearing from the woodwork of her marriage were not original. She had become like the other office wives. She knew by heart the script the Gucci and Prada draped vultures would enact over Luis Vuitton and chardonnay. They would dissect her marriage, clawing and tearing at it, until it became a carcass. This was an apt image for Alice’s own feelings; only it was how she felt about herself, rather than her marriage.
She did not even feel that he had stabbed her in the back. She had taken the wife’s sword head on. She had allowed the late nights, the, once again clichéd, lipstick marks and scents on him other than hers. She had just hoped to ignore all of this, to in a sense to ignore her past, to ignore its decision to walk right into her present.
This sword was of course double-edged. She could accept, although it stirred the pride she had thought long dead, that her husband no longer found her physically attractive, that marriage and childbirth had ravished her looks. She wasn’t even angry at him for sleeping with another woman. And it was not, as she had originally thought, that he had shared intimate moments with anyone but her, she was not madly in love with her husband as she was in her twenties. The sword’s edge revealed to her that she had been left to fade, whilst he had been allowed to bloom. Whilst he had been blossoming into top sales executive and evidently master seducer she had withered. The sunlight of the beginnings of her marriage had faded and the demands of wife, mother and socialite had over-watered her roots. And now she was left as all of those around her blooming and reaching for the sun. She had sustained them and now she was left to admire the heights they reached as she died and shrivelled.
Was this the wife’s sword? As she says ‘I do’ does some force descend from nowhere and take a sword placing it just before her, waiting to drive it into her at the right moment? This moment will reveal to the woman all that her marriage has given her very little for all that she has given up. At the sword swipes, like a mirror it reveals all that lies behind her. There will be a sunny path leading off on the left hand side. It looks like a child’s drawing, with a big yellow sun with long rays, rabbits playing in luscious green grass and butterflies in the blue skies. And this is the last thing she sees before the sword plunges into her.