the walks didn't help.
more and more often, these days, she found herself haunting the streets and paths around her home, late at night, searching, perhaps, for the answers to her compulsions.
she didn't know if it was his violence which drove her away, or his great love for her. they were, ultimately, the same thing. but her appetite for violence had waned, over the years, and now she had, more frequently, only silence for his words.
there is no feeling more startlingly empty than not hate, nor loneliness, but indifference. she had become, quite suddenly it appeared to her (though she knew, of course, that it had taken years of careful progress) irrelevant. she lived on the edges of her children's existences, patiently tidying the borders of their lives.
and, somehow, after walking for miles around the twisting alleys and safe streets of her organised, neat, little housing colony, she always found herself at the steps of her own driveway. and always with the same, inexplicable, question.
'what if,' he had whispered into her ear.

*
he had told her so many stories, once, and she, being young and fond of the violence inherent in the telling, had loved him. and they had made love, in the moonlight, madly, her skin being pushed into the cold, red earth, her fingers clutching at the night as he made her scream. 
she still remembered feeling the cold air on his warm skin, the taste of his syllables as she carressed them out of his mouth and into her own. the-

*

and, every night, she took that question, and placed it, neatly, in the back of her mind, for another night. for a night when she felt, perhaps, a little stronger.

- auntie em's story -