Flight

an excerpt

I’m wearing a grey wig to my baby daughter’s funeral so no one will recognize me. Waiting in the shadows of a side street off the main square, I watch the attendant usher the mourners into the church, and wrestle with the better woman who haunts me, the one Richard thought he’d married. That woman would be bent over with a sadness that makes her gasp for air. I try to feel it, the kind of grief that robs you of any desire to live. I rip the tag off the hat I bought and lower the veil over my face.

They are all inside now. The square is empty but, wary of a straggler or two, I lean heavily on the cane the way I’d practiced and make my way to the mournful tolling of the tenor bell.

I come from a long line of women who never should have had children. I am the last of them and this will be the last day of my old life.

The church smells of incense and furniture polish. A light breeze drifts through the oriel windows, flattening the flames of the beeswax candles. I hope to blend in with those few old women, bent, shrouded, nameless, who are fixtures in any place of worship, and remember to cross myself with the holy water. I choose a seat behind a stone column near the back. There are more mourners than I expected, but a child’s death will always bring them out.

In nomine Patris et fillii et Spiritus Sancti ...