Vulture

I'm not sure when I stopped loving her. Maybe it was when our little girl died. Maybe before that. When that lodger moved in. Maybe it was when I walked in on the two of them.

Oh, not like that. No, she was crying you see. It was the day we got the news about Loretta. He had put his arms round her, and I walked in He didn't pull back, or look guilty. He gave me this helpless, dopey expression over the top of her head. It said, "women, am I right?"

In that moment, I was still a fairly happy man. Whole Living a normal life, in a normal world. I didn't know the reason yet. For those tears. Once I learned, though, something about his reaction seemed off. He'd been living with us a while, treated almost like family. Clearly thought well enough of the children to get a thoughtful birthday gift. Yet he didn't seem upset at all.

Falling out of love can be just as sneaky as falling into it. Little by little, creeping up on you, until one day you open your eyes and there's a new emotion you weren't expecting.

So, like I said, I don't know when I started stopping. But I do remember the day I realised I felt only contempt.

When we first met, she had all these rippling waves of shining dark hair. As men we are supposed to ogle other bits of women's bodies, but I was quite taken with all that hair. I never admitted it to any of my friends. They'd have laughed. Wouldn't have got it.

Truth is, I loved the way it felt. The way it smelled. The way it trailed across my face sometimes. The way it sprung up into ringlets when she washed it.

She put these little drops of oil in it, braided it, and fastened it up on top of her head before bed. Seeing behind the curtain how she managed it, didn't make me like it less.

After we had kids, she was going to cut it short. Too much hassle to care for it. It's not very manly, I know, but I pouted. I begged her not to cut it off. She smiled at me, and kissed me. Kept washing, and combing, and oiling, and braiding... For me. Seeing that bun on top of her head at bedtime caused a catch, an ache, somewhere behind my ribs.

One night sometime after our little Loretta died, and I'd found her weeping in the arms of that smarmy lodger... We were having sex, and that bun was wobbling away on top of her head. It annoyed me. It looked silly. I realised I was only going through the motions and I didn't really want to be doing this. Didn't want to be anywhere near her. That was the moment I realised I had no love left for her. I could have wondered when it leaked away, but that would have been depressing.

Grief had been eating away at me, and then when I finally got a brief moment of respite from its incessant gnawing, the love I'd expected to be there underneath was gone.

The love and pain we both felt for the child taken from us should have bound us together. Maybe we'd been counting on that. The distance between us grew, with neither of us knowing how to cross it. Always with the backdrop of wide eyes and worried faces of our other children. Bobby, being so little, seemed least affected. Liza and Ellison had a permant question mark hovering in their expressions. What now?

I thought it might work again between the two of us. Flourish, you know. Spark. It took a while to accept that it probably wouldn't. It took a while longer before I could make myself admit to myself that I should leave. Longer still before I could break the news. I wondered if she would turn to the lodger after I was gone, and realised I hardly cared.

Coward that I am, I did the telling and the leaving on the same day. The lodger lurked in the wings, in the corner of my vision. Circling, ready to pick clean what I left behind. I sneered, but I did it after I'd turned away so we could ignore each other.

+

Thank you for reading!