Scribes’ Tribe Scribblings

She dresses in the dark, putting on her Armani. She looks smart in a business suit. Turning on the light in the bathroom, she shuts the door quietly to work on finishing touches. She pulls back her hair in a bun, tight and severe, to expose her high cheekbones. Subdued, with just a hint of sexy. For the final, fatal stroke, she applies Mystic Wine lip color. Her dark lips lightly brush her husband’s cheek as he sleeps. Across the hall, she glances at the door, walks softly past to avoid waking her son.

She makes work by seven-thirty. Meetings and memos, hot gossip and coffee. She power lunches at eleven and wins the account. Over fresh Xerox copies, she flirts with the new guy. He flirts back, and she thinks, “I’ve still got it.”

In order to “keep it,” she stops by the gym after work. Dressed in black spandex, she crunches with the twenty-year-olds. Then it’s off to home in a sweat.

She walks in to the sight of him straining pasta. “Dinner in five,” he says, smiling. Her husband is a saint.

Over strips of fettuccine and steaming bread, they discuss the day. She looks across the table at her son. “How did your project go—what was it on?”

“Volcanoes,” he says with a shrug. He goes back to pushing peas around his plate, then asks to be excused, disappearing into his room to fight the bad guys on his X-Box.

“I got the account,” she says to her husband, “and a promotion, too.”

“You deserve it,” he says pleasantly. Their marriage was pleasant.

Later in bed, he turns to her. “You know, we don’t need the money,” he says, referring to the promotion.

She switches the light off. “We can talk about it in the morning,” she answers, though she doesn’t intend to bring up the subject.

In the middle of the night she wakes and can’t go back to sleep. She wraps a blanket around her and makes her nightly pilgrimage across the hall to her only child’s room and
enters his world of spaceships and racecars and dinosaurs. On the nightstand is a mound of clay, mountain-shaped, with a splash of orange paint for the lava.

She sits beside his bed and watches the gentle rise and fall of his body as he sleeps. He has grown some, she thinks and wonders why she hadn’t noticed before.

The tears come, then, hot and flowing, as she mourns the loss.

And in the last hour, she rises from her chair and goes to her closet to find another Armani.

She looks smart in a business suit.

–Amy Harke-Moore