Crushing

by Genevieve Novak

It was crushing to watch my two favourite women, smart and funny and fantastic in every way, settle so far below their worth, and worse still, to hear them defend it.

This is what it is to be a woman: to give. To give life, to give support, to give herself, to give in. And in return she receives: contempt, indifference, more requests, his load. She gives until she breaks, a spiderweb of cracks in her porcelain skin, holding still until she shatters into a thousand tiny pieces.