Five Moments

Sometimes, in the midst of an especially dark night, rain drizzling, the sound of footsteps pounding against stairs, she would allow herself to imagine five moments. Five different instances within five different futures.

The state of those moments always depended on the state of the footsteps. If they stumbled heavily, the moments were heavy as well, shadows of the life she was already living. If they footsteps were light, the moments brightened. An improved reflection rather than a darker shadow.

And sometimes, when a full moon shined between the blinds, she would allow herself one question. Why? Why stay? Do you want to live this way?

The danger of these nights is she never stops at one question.

Only at night does she thinks of these things. In the day she goes shopping, does laundry, and conducts bath time with a mother's precision. It is in the day that she receives the answers to her questions that plague her in the dark, the reason her moments must stay locked beneath the bed, only to come crawling out in the dead of night.

These answers and reasons come in the face of a boy squinting against the soap in his eyes during his bath. In his blanket she washes every week. In the carrots she buys for him at the store.

They’re in his grin when he sees his father come home from work early and the sound of his laughter when they conspire with quiet, happy whispers.

It is these things that she thinks of when the footsteps stop in front of her door, when she pushes her moments and questions away to be greeted with her son’s father.

She wilts under his blows and taunts and does not allow herself anything but acceptance, survival, simple preservation, unwilling to taint her five moments with all of his hate.

It isn’t until a dreary Sunday evening that she finds a slightly different answer.

She had left him with his father for an afternoon of Christmas shopping. With only four items crossed off her list, her husband called, bidding her to come home. Her son was hurt, he had said.

It seems silly now, but it never occurred to her on the way back that her child had been damaged in any other way than a simple fall, like her husband claimed. She'll refuse to forgive herself for this particular aggression.

She brushed past him at the front door, unconcerned for his distress. She bounded up stairs, him following closely behind until they reached her son's room together.

Door opened, she steps swiftly into the room before faltering, surprise etched onto her face as her husband shifts uncomfortably, worried at his wife's reaction.

Toys flung, curtains ripped, lamp broken; all marks of a story she did not receive in the phone call. A whimper draws her to her son, curled into a ball, wedged into a corner, and shivering violently.

She lifts her child into her arms, his body hanging limply, feeling more like a doll than an actual human.

With his face visible, the bruises forming, the cuts bleeding and the bat she picks up as well, a long stick of wood that brings a violent touch far too familiar, the answers to her questions suddenly seem so transparent, the future moments now plausible.

And with a bat and child in hand she walks steadily with realization, acceptance, and perseverance in a form she has ever experienced before exploding through her body.

With these she leaves, and does not turn back.

With these she leaves, and does not turn back.