Unfaithful

Days and nights she’d spent for him. Time was the one commodity that could never be taken back. Money was not irreplaceable, no matter what they said. Money was precious as water, but so long as one was willing to work to boil the salt out of it there was a whole ocean eternally waiting to be drawn from.

She had given him her life. Bound herself to him as wife to husband, and thought it right and good. She had borne him six sons, left herself alone in the kitchens and never complained as she slaved before the hearth to feed their hungry mouths. She was the milked cow, set in her ways and content to chew her cud and wait for herself to dry up and be put down.

When she found the letters, something inside her old bovine body stirred. That odd greyness faded, the tiredness washed away. She felt for the first time in decades a familiar sharpness in her chest. The hotness of rage. The idea that he’d been using his trips to town to lie with a whore, to spit his weak trickle of old seed into the loins of a slut, shook her. Her fingers pressed into the pages and a snarl peeled her lips from her teeth.

Was she not deserving of loyalty? Had her lifetime of service not been enough? Had her years of submitting to his wishes over and over not gained her some place in his heart?

He’d gotten her pregnant. He would have an illegitimate son. The whore would reap the benefit of HER womb, and her children, hard earned through her own pain, would work to feed the mouth of the unholy spawn.

As she kneaded the dough for the bread that night, she molded their faces. Her fingers worked rough caricatures to life. She smashed them. Pounded them. Broke them down.

She thought of them bringing the food she had made to their mouths. She thought of him especially, chewing away. Thought of him later that night deciding he needed sating. Thought of him using his calloused hands to peel at her dress and stick in her what he’d stuck between the legs of a diseased, fallen woman.

She beat the bread till her knuckles bled. She hollered her rage at unheeding walls.

She added yeast.

She added flour.

She added broken glass.

They would eat well that night.