Godiva Undone

To hear my reading of "Godiva" go to the Readings page.

She echoed these words to herself as she lay dying in want of something more; something exciting like a ride through Coventry. “I cannot pretend to be a box of chocolates. I cannot pretend I am capable of love. Shouldn't you have awakened as well,” she asked looking at the sleeping form beside her.

"Those who dream that they are Cleopatra awaken to find black booted reality stomping upon their crystalline fancies." This would be her explanation for the shattered glass upon the floor. If only the shag carpet was able to hungrily swallow each shard of unhinged mirror like a Bedouin in search of one drop of liquid sustenance. But no, reality is not as kind as dreams.

Her old dreams hung upon her brow like beads of sweat, trickling down where they were happily caught on her tongue. She delighted in their salty-sweet-haziness as she silently cleaned up the floor.

“That is all that remains of who I was in murky hoped for memory,” she thought, remembering the poems she’d written and tossed aside like trash. “My memory and I are long lost friends. She and I may have been writing you on those thrown away scraps, so much like these shards. Would you recognize our hands in spite of the blood? In spite of what time has taken from them?”

She looked at her hands. They were no longer beautiful and smooth as they’d been when he’d wrapped her fingers in platinum and gold sealing her as his own. Even their stones had lost their enticing gleam. Her hands ached under the weight of wifely obligations.

Once her hands ached from writing. She remembered in college, how her pen hummed happily; hungry for words, these children of its unholy union with wanton paper and thought. She believed the day would come when she would write them all; delighting in each syllable and phrase. 

Words weren’t dangerous in those days before her husband told her to “hush” whenever she tried to speak. Ideas flowed freely unhindered, and safety hadn’t been their aim. Smoke wasn't the signal of her anger and repression, which she exhaled in explosive bursts.

It had finally come. It had come. The day. This day had come, and now surrender rose on the horizon beckoning her to accept that as the definition of her life. And she smiled in the knowing that this step was not the final one, but the first of many towards oblivion.

This story grew from this poem, "Godiva."