THE BUTTON: By Lindy Ryan
Wednesday, December 28th, 2011Sara stood alone in the pale light of the nursery, humming bits of old lullabies to the baby in the crib. His eyelids heavied with sleep and she drew a blanket across the small lump of his body, careful not to wake him. A button slipped from the folds of thecloth, tumbled across the baby’s cheek, and rested on his pillow.
Sara pinched the button from her son’s bed. The unthreaded holes looked up at her like two knowing eyes, and she fingered the empty sockets of the cool circle. Her mind stalked her home’s closets for the button’s match, but came back empty. She gave away nothing with her dead woman’s face when she met the button’s unblinking stare.
A clock chimed faintly from another room: her husband would be home in an hour. The button thumped secretly in Sara’s clenched fist as she closed the nursery door behind her.
Never whispers greeted her as she combed through her closet’s clothes, hunting for an empty slot of cloth to claim the button. Sara clenched her jaw, biting at the thoughts slithering into the darker places of her mind. Her hands grew feverish and jerky; clothes littered the closet floor in tangled heaps. The button was not hers.
Sara whimpered, like a small, frightened animal, when the first salty tears began to drip from her eyes. She swayed , but only a bit, and leaned against the bedroom door. Tears beaded into sweat trickled against her neck like ice melting in a cold glass. He had done it again.
Snarled lips scraped her teethas Sara pictured her husband pawing a blonde-haired woman on their bed. She saw cheap red lipstick smeared across his gasping mouth, saw him tear the woman’s shirt open to cup her perked breasts. The button hurled from the cloth. That cheating bastard. He’d done it again, and this time, she’d caught him. The clock chimed again: half an hour.
Sara tucked the button in her dress pocket and snatched pots from the cabinet shelves to prepare her husband’s favorite meal. She sliced a heavy knife through juicy vegetables andset them to boil in a large kettle on the stove. She watched the soup bubble and stroked the button. She waited.
Wine was poured and dinner was set on the table when his car crept up the drive. He shrugged his coat off and said nothing as he dunked his spoon into the thick soup, brought it to his lips, and drank. They ate in muted silence, the clinking of the silverware the only lonely sound at the loveless table. He downed the wine glass in one long swallow.
The bastard rubbed his full belly at the other end up the table and smiled at Sara. His lips twitched grossly and strained, his spoon clattered to the floor. Sara watched a thought skip through his eyes as the drug sped through his veins and he flung his arm across the table, pleading to his wife. His pale hand floundered, knocked the salt to the floor, and went limp. Sara studied her husband while his body wilted against the dinner table, facedown in the soup. His head bobbed as he took his final breaths and drowned in the half-eaten inches of his favorite meal.
She ignored the dead man acrossthe table and finished her dinner. When the soup had warmed her stomach, she ambled to her lifeless husband. His hair floated peacefully between chunks of withered vegetables. She drew the dead man upright against the chair, brushed his soggy hair back, and wiped the soup that dribbled from his chin with her housedress. She smoothed the folds of the dress against her body, pausing to fiddle with an empty space where a button had once been, and began to pull her husband’s dead body to the kitchen.
______________________________
©2011 Lindy Ryan
An eclectic author of speculative and women’s fiction and poetry, Lindy’s first collection of poetry, Pieces, was published in 2007. She is an avid reader and writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and she hopes one day to write full-time from a cabin lost in the forests of Maine.
