The Easier Wait

by Suzan Abrams

She was afflicted not by the chatisement of a severe reprimand or the imprisonment that served for quiet longing as she was in licking the wounds from the torn spirit underneath her, like one of a lone woman who waited and watched at the water's edge for a lover that would not come.

The woman as she remembered, having once spied on her while on a late route home, had paused on the threshhold of the twilight. She stood mannequined against the scenery of early stars that posed as her lamplight: All the while, her eyes searched for the vague shadow of a boat.

Perhaps it was trapped in a bough and stabbed by twigs with sinister intentions. Perhaps it had lost its way from having tailed the haphazard rush of wide-eyed ripples, determined that lovers should meet. She waited and watched for a husband who may have been jawed by a sharp-teethed fish or stung by a snake. She waited and watched for a husband who may have been caught somewhere in a morning daylight by another pair of ring-spangled hands, in a forgotten land where only the sun could see.

And so, it was for the woman who waited and watched the lone woman whose husband did not come, that her own fears of affliction stemming from the heavy truths of a cancelled dinner date, seemed trivial by comparison in the tragic weight of another's looming desolation.