Purple Skies

With her fingertips, Eve traced the crow feet that dug deep around her eyes. Assisted by a mirror, she feigned a smile to see what affect that had on her face and couldn’t but put more powder after seeing how that facial expression emphasized the wrinkles that had swallowed her. She stretched two thick lines of red upon her lips then started turning around in front of the full-length mirror when a hoarse voice came shouting from the other room, ‘Damn it Eve, the plane is gonna leave and you are still getting dressed! Last month, we got on it by a miracle”

      Not because it frightened her that a shiver ran down her spine; more likely ,it took her by surprise. Instinctively, she hid the lipstick afraid Henry would come and throw one of his cruel jokes. A second thence, she regained her self-control and shouted back, “How many times do I have to tell you not to scare me like that. One of these days, you are gonna get me a heart-attack.”

  “And you are gonna get me a hemorrhage!”

   “Fine, just wait a second”

   “You’ve been telling me this for the past hour”

    “Perhaps if you just stopped shouting and gave me a chance to finish I’d be done by now”

  “Women!” That was meant to be audible by him alone, but seething as he was, it came out too loud for anyone in the house to hear.

   Eve could never  function under the least sort of pressure. While trying to fit in her make-up set into the bag, she wound up dropping everything on ground. It was quite a mess. “Oh God!” escaped her lips in a whisper. She was leaning down to get it but already, half of her body was twisted in the door direction where a fuming Henry was waiting outside. Waggling in her place, she decided she should get out of the room.

  “You know, I think it took the Egyptians less time to build the pyramids,” he said mockingly, “all three of them.”

   Quite used to it, Eve only said, “Can’t we just get it over with?”

  “You are telling me this?”

    He looked at her face and found no response, then silently bent down to carry the bags to the trunk of the car.

   In college, Henry and Eve were deeply in love and right after graduation the wedding was held in a small church assembling their closest friends and family members. They both worked in the same place, but a few months later, Eve discovered she was pregnant. Being her first pregnancy, it was the hardest and she couldn’t resume work. After the baby came, she was too busy to even consider any other thing. Two years later, she was pregnant again and with two little kids and a husband who came in the night, she couldn’t be anything but a stay-at-home-mom. It was only after her two kids left for college that she felt the unworthiness of her situation turning into a stay-at-home-no-one. Now, a grandmother of three, life had nothing else to offer.

    In the car, she leaned on the window letting her eyes wonder to the sky. The sun was about to rise. The sky had an eerie color, purple; and  she couldn’t remember the last time she saw a purple sky; perhaps she had never seen a purple sky. For a second, she saw her reflection in the rearview mirror but then looked back again. Clouds were strewn in disarray that she could find no definition to. She looked at Henry, brow-knitted, and tried to trace the Henry she married. Still resting on the window, she smiled for no apparent reason, closed her eyes and slept.