Staved Lucidity
 
It took only a few, small psychic nips to puncture the delusion that this was a liaison glued together with love.  Their bed less a table for lust’s banquet and more the stainless steel stage set for a coroner’s professional dissection.  She has been eroded by grief, losing the buffer of her naive facade.  Now that she is nakedly vulnerable, he has begun ripping away her credulity, an incision at a time, with a small pocket knife.  Smearing the warm roses of guilty fingerprints, defacing this perimeter depicting a terminal betrayal of trust.  Deflated, she lies in a clotted tangle, amputated from happy-ever-after, weaned prematurely from hope.  One silk stocking coquettishly strangling a lacerated ankle.  Her black nun’s shoe clashing with the open ebony obscenity between her loosely sprawled thighs.  A raven sails across the top of this homicidal vignette, towing the moral of the story, assisted by his ignorant brother, a dove.  The mortally wounded woman shuts both eyes, turns her face to the gore spattered wall.  Understanding spins into a tight frame of acutely killing focus.  The first cut tests her capacity for creating lame excuses in her philandering husband’s behalf.  Succeeding revelations fine-tune the details, fix the treacherous depth of field, define the hard-line reality that bleeds her to death.
 

Copyright 1986, Jennifer Lagier
 
Jennifer Lagier teaches at Hartnell College in Salinas, California, and serves on the Steering Committee of the National Writers Union, Local 7.  "Staved Lucity" originally appeared in Exquisite Corpse.

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