Jenny with a View

Indie Ink Challenge October 17 - Sep 21 2011

Prompt: After 25 Years of Marriage

Another wedding invitation in the mail, tossed on the table as carelessly as the two fools had rushed into this impending parade of painted faces and painful shoes.

Jenny eyed the golden embroidery that outlined the off-white envelope, letters grandly drawn in ye olde Englysche penmanship, spelling out the name, the very existence of, the addressee. It was for her. She sat there resenting it. How something as easy as a string of letters meant it was for her; how something as simple as two people, four spoken words and a few signatures could glue people together.

Twenty-five years, Carl.

A voice echoed out of her neighbours apartment, down the corridor, barging into Jenny's room. She thought it quite rude to arrive uninvited, to come uncalled for.

Twenty. Five. Fucking. Years.

The voice got louder. Jenny smirked at Mrs. Cho's preference for emphasis over punctuation. So very dramatic, you could almost see her rehearsing her lines in her head before she spat them out.

Unable to avoid the parade going on next door, Jenny listened to Mrs. Cho's increasingly agitated shrieks. It would seem that her husband had not quite been the devoted spouse everyone assumed he was. He'd been naughty, Jenny knew, and she was upset by this disturbance.

In the quiet of her cosy home, her most devoted lover was paying good money to keep her in this fancy apartment so she would always be close, and this outburst was very unbecoming of a high street setting. Take it to the street, won't you?

She drummed her fingers on the wedding-laden tabletop, a lock of her hair tucked girlishly into her mouth as she sucked on it like a straw. She wondered how she knew. She wondered if he'd told her.

The screaming stopped as Jenny's blank gaze took her further and further away from what she new would be reality rushing to meet her, to greet her with one hell of a blow.

A loud, deadly knock on the door, followed by a sudden buzz; Jenny's table on the phone with a new text message. It contained two words, two simple words, 8 strung-out strung together letters that meant something; they really did. They meant something that she didn't need to be told, really.

She knows.  

This week's Indie Ink Challenge came from Deborah Elliot, who gave me this prompt: After twenty-five years of marriage. I challenged Jules with the prompt And at once she knew, nothing is quite as it seems.