Stitches

Nov 06, 2010 23:09

“Mama?” she said. The word cut through every layer: the dark house, the late hour, the deep sleep, the gin still polluting her blood, the dream still spinning whimsically. All of it sliced away as if with a scalpel by her daughter's voice on the telephone.

Answering the phone had never been Rosa’s strong suit. Something about speaking to someone miles away, unseeing, unfeeling. It made it so many times easier to lie, and so many times harder.

“Mama?” her daughter asked again. “Are you there?”

Of course she was there. “Julia,” she tested her daughter’s name, feeling it roll off her tongue with the smell of the spirits in her breath.

“Mama - ” there was a crack in her daughter’s voice - “Ethan’s dead.”

And that was it. Rosa simply let the phone fall out of her hand into the welcoming cradle of the receiver. She did not reach for the still-half-empty bottle of gin resting on her bed stand; nor did she return to the same whimsical dreams of nothing and everything.

genre:drabble, length:medium

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