Sometimes
endurance is coming home from war and learning how to sit through Thanksgiving dinner while everyone asks if you “ever killed anybody.”
Derek threw a right cross.
I parried.
His elbow opened.
I could
have dislocated it.
I didn’t.
He tried a knee.
I turned.
He lost balance.
I guided him into the fence.
Not slammed.
Guided.
The humiliation made him furious.
“What are you doing?” he hissed.
“Surviving.”
He shoved away.
Claire yelled, “Derek, finish him!”
That one landed harder than his punches.
I looked toward her.
She froze.
For fourteen years, I had slept beside that woman.
Held her through her mother’s funeral.
Built shelves in the nursery we never got to use after our second miscarriage.
Learned to make the ridiculous lemon cake she
