She lights her second cigarette on the stove burner and blows the smoke out the window over the kitchen sink. Outside the window, the clouds melt pink into orange into yellow into white. Even she can’t believe what she’s thinking.
It’s been growing up in the corners, this thought. How long it’s been unfurling underground, Mary isn’t sure. She thinks of Christmas Eve night, of a holy creature stirring a storm, of being an angel and a warrior. Of being a housewife or a hunter. Of the whole spectrum of things between them. Of who might know a few things about that.
Her life has been centered for so long around this incompatibility, this wrongness, this dichotomy that can never be resolved. What is she, without this pain?