house of empty women

(a work in progress)

All the women's lives were wasted. Sadness collected in the corners of their eyes. They could find nothing to do with themselves but clean for hours, then sit in faded armchairs, crying. Listening quietly to the ticking of the clocks, the slow rotting of their bones. The ineptitude of their frail, small bodies, all the dust constellations in the light fixtures they couldn't reach.

In silent houses, the women wait. For the water to boil, for the dinners to cook. For our husbands. We awaken to rooms scattered with debris. You can't get rid of the dust and grime. From empty corners, from our minds. Thinking, Where did the years go? What did they get me? A life now of aloneness. Our reflections in the too polished surfaces. Every year adding a new line to our withered faces. Decades falling away like mist. Like the sad chimes of the doorbell that never rings.

We cried over the chickens. The blood and the boil. We were always haunted things. Drunk on loneliness, in love with dust and shadows. With witches and ghosts. We were born broken, don't remember being anything but. Damaged, missing parts that all the others seemed to have.

There's no way around it, this gut wrenching emptiness. All the games have lost their pieces. We ride the tilt a whirl til we vomit. We are broken past fixing. Seduced by the way dust covers everything. By the way love needs constant nurturing but hatred never dies.

Always tiny cracks in the dishes and water dripping from the tap. Things slithering through the pipes. Behind our husbands’ intentions. How love can annihilate, then enervate me.

And of course, nothing ever stayed clean. They were never grateful, always taking and taking, wanting more and more. Till the flesh hung from our gaunt, bloodless bodies. Till the corpses of flies and cockroaches soaked all the flower arrangements.

Always, the days passed in the same fashion. Nothing seemed interesting anymore, nothing shimmered with hope. There was nothing we could say anymore. But we kept cooking and cleaning. Sometimes late into the night hours when our thoughts kept racing and we couldn't sleep. In the afternoons, shaky on coffee and empty stomachs, we could barely whisper, Hi honey, how was your day?