Beautiful Sorrows by Mercedes M. Yardley Read Free Book Online Page B

something in the air had shifted. The atmosphere was holding its breath, and it was undeniable.
    “Hey,” Peter said, leaning casually on the white desk. “There’s only one sorrow that I have left.”
    “Only one?” asked the girl with something that sounded exquisitely close to hope. Her eyes shone. Her white hair and red lips were glossed with fragile expectation. She produced the Container of Sorrows and carefully removed its lid. Peter’s sorrows ghosted around inside, smelling of lavender and brokenness.
    “Natalia Bench never looks at me at school.”
    The vaporous sorrow swirled from his lips and settled into the jar. The girl’s white fingers didn’t move, so Peter put the lid back on for her.
    He smiled. “Now I’ll be brave enough to talk to her tomorrow. Thank you very much, Girl of Sorrows. I am happy.”
    The girl held the jar very close, and she looked up at Peter. Her lips were pale, strawberries buried under layers of ice. He was reminded of that feeling that he had once, long ago, where he thought that something supped from her lips at night. How frightened she must be. How alone.
    How silly.
    “Goodbye,” he said, and kissed her cheek. Had her touch once burned? She was ice under his skin. She was a corpse. Peter turned and walked away without looking back.
    There was a girl. She sat at a white desk in a white room where she wept, clutching a container full of somebody else’s sorrows.

 
    A PLACE OF BEAUTY

    She left her husband because of him.
    There was no scandal. There was no affair. One day she was struggling off of the subway, and she saw a man in a long coat, staring at the skyscrapers like a tourist. Only she’d seen him before at this same stop, and she realized that he lived here. He lived in the city, yet he still devoured the buildings and sidewalks and yes, even the graffiti as though he were starving. He loved this city, loved it insanely. He, as Edgar Allan Poe had so yearningly put it, “loved with a love that was more than love,” and this made her realize something: her husband did not love her. Oh, he had grown quite used to her, which isn’t the same thing, not at all. He’d most likely be upset when she left, and might miss the warm spots that her body created in the house where she slept and bathed. He might perk his ears listening for the sounds of her walking the floor at night, as she did quite often when she couldn’t sleep, but these things are so very different from love. His having grown comfortable with her presence wasn’t enough for her anymore.
    “Oh, Gary,” she said that evening, after turning down the television. He promptly turned it back up, so she flipped the TV off. He turned it back on, so she flipped it off, unplugged it, and then pushed the entire thing to the floor with a mighty and quite delicious crash.
    “Oh, Gary,” she said again, a shining goddess amidst the glass and wires of the shattered television, “this isn’t going to work, you see. I have grown very tired of you, and I don’t think that I love you anymore. And you, well, you never loved me in the first place, so why don’t we part amicably? Do stop fussing; I’ll purchase you a new television.”
    Gary made sounds like he wanted her to stay, but after she crossed her arms over her chest and said, “Really? You do? Why?” he couldn’t think of a compelling reason.
    “I like that you make food. I like having somebody to share my bed whenever I want. I like coming home to a clean house and I like the way that my laundry smells,” he said rather lamely.
    She smiled then, and kissed him on his cheek, and said that almost all of these things could be accomplished with a good maid, and that all of them could be accomplished with a bad one. She wrote down the name of their fabric softener, put on her best hat, and picked up her suitcase.
    “I’m leaving now, darling. I shall mail the divorce papers to you. Please be well, and know that I shall always think of you