Hope and the Patient Man by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Author:Mike Reeves-McMillan
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: C-Side Media
Published: 2014-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

Bucket had gone out — his hat was missing — and Dignified and Rosie were working on adjacent benches in a thick silence. Hope walked home, stumbling every so often as she turned over the new information again and again.

She remembered her first time with Faithful. He had got her drunk and then pressed her, over her objections, saying that he loved her and that if she loved him she would let him. She had given in. Was that how it was with Father and Mother? It was hard to imagine weak, worried Father talking Mother into anything she didn’t want to do, but perhaps they had changed. Perhaps she had become angry, and he had become weak and worried, since then. Perhaps he had got her so drunk she couldn’t say no.

I am the result of a loveless union, she thought. Well, she had always known that, more or less. My mother resents me because she never wanted me. Again, not really that new an idea, more a confirmation than anything.

So why did she feel so hollow and unanchored?

She lay on her bed when she got home and had a cry. She cried at the fall of a leaf since hitting her head, it was like her tear valve had broken and was leaking at the slightest thing. When she finished, her head felt stuffed with rags and she couldn’t concentrate enough even to get up and fetch her papers, let alone work on them. She lay there, her thoughts going round and round in a whirlpool of doubts and fears.

Eventually, she slept, and woke groggy and itchy. Washing her face and eating and drinking gave her enough alertness to fiddle with some papers, but she made little progress on her article. Her mind kept lurching back to the pit that had opened in her image of her own life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.