TIME
It is eleven pm on a Friday night when Penny Otts, Parliment in hand, decides to quit smoking. She is looking at the faded spot on her finger where, just three years ago, her wedding ring sat and wonders why it hasn't tanned over. Her thumb strokes a pattern there, the way it did when the fat lump of gold bumped up against her knuckle and suddenly realizes that she is getting old. It hits her like a ton of bricks and, instinctively, she reaches a hand to her cheek, touching the soft skin there, feeling for new crevices. She does this ten, sometimes twenty times a day but, in her stubbornness, she refuses to equate it with anything other than what it is--a search for wrinkles.
The air is clear and she tastes the ash from her cigarette and it begins to fill her entire mouth, smoke heating her tongue. Below the waist of her pants, a small pouch of stomach-fat sags, the last of what her fast-acting diet pills won't liquidate, and she tugs at it pensively. By degrees, it rushes back to her, all her regrets forming solid alliances with ungainly freckles on her arm, the mole on her shoulder, the flab on her buttocks. The three deadbeat boyfriends are equal to a stretch mark, the botched estate sale to a crows foot. All the times the kids have fucked up in school to one more yellowed toenail, a toenail that she paints over with a garish red that is, truth be told, ten years too young for her.
Without ceremony, Penny flicks that last filter over the buckled railing of the porch, imagining its flight over the snowdrifts, its projected landing between the chasims. Squinting, she can just make out the detail of the beach, streetlight catching the bend in the road around it. The ice glints dully at her, unmoving, solid.
Beyond that, she sees nothing.
The air is clear and she tastes the ash from her cigarette and it begins to fill her entire mouth, smoke heating her tongue. Below the waist of her pants, a small pouch of stomach-fat sags, the last of what her fast-acting diet pills won't liquidate, and she tugs at it pensively. By degrees, it rushes back to her, all her regrets forming solid alliances with ungainly freckles on her arm, the mole on her shoulder, the flab on her buttocks. The three deadbeat boyfriends are equal to a stretch mark, the botched estate sale to a crows foot. All the times the kids have fucked up in school to one more yellowed toenail, a toenail that she paints over with a garish red that is, truth be told, ten years too young for her.
Without ceremony, Penny flicks that last filter over the buckled railing of the porch, imagining its flight over the snowdrifts, its projected landing between the chasims. Squinting, she can just make out the detail of the beach, streetlight catching the bend in the road around it. The ice glints dully at her, unmoving, solid.
Beyond that, she sees nothing.