COWS

by Matthew Stokoe

Lucy was washing clothes in the kitchen sink when he got home. She had become adept at finding and performing chores, endless small charades of domesticity to fill up the hours and rock her brain to sleep. She never left the flat, the horror of other people was too easy to see - the way their faces twisted, the way their backs bent, the uncounted ways of holding themselves and moving and looking at you like they were peeling their heads open to show some pornographic shot of pain. If a woman in a shop ran her hand through her hair in a particular way Lucy would know the agony of her childhood, the terror of her parents, the loneliness and the fear that were now the territories of her existence. So she stayed inside and didn't look and avoided the reminders of what she knew herself still to be. Sometimes, when Steven was at the plant she went out on the roof and watched the city, but it was meaningless to her. The shapes of the buildings were difficult to focus on, they slipped anonymously away from her gaze into a two dimensional scene that was alien and impossible to interpret and, worse, held no reward for any struggle of understanding. All the buildings were empty. So she'd go back downstairs and wipe the windows and scrub the concrete in the bathroom, trying to choke back the brainfilth that boiled up against this bland canvas. The time with Steven, with the baby growing slowly in her belly, had been a clamping-down on the constant awareness of the damage she carried w...

Love this quote.