Lying out in the pouring rain, face to the cold pavement, she sees the sideways supermarket flowers drenched, and hears the crackle of their plastic wrapping under the force of the deluge.
The pain in her flesh is half as severe as the pain in her heart. This is how he leaves her, time and time again. All at once she is repelled by the creature he has become and mortified by the desperation that drives her back to him. He's driven away everyone else, so he's all that remains to her. She sees now that this is all his design. The names. The lies. The beatings. A slow, violent peeling of her person, until she is little more than ash blowing in the wind of his breath.
She is lying there for a long time. Her fingers and toes and face are numb from the cold. Her tears run freely into the rain that runs down her cheeks, then down into the gutter. She is there long enough to realise that no one else is coming to pick her up. She must do that herself. And she does. Slowly. Painfully. She rises to her feet.
Paddy Dobson
29th March 2022