Beatrice winced her eyes shut tight. She was ready to see the sound of her heart falling to the tiled floor, shattering into a million pieces. The double strip, a sure sign of the beginning. He was going to leave.
Daniel, a man of routine and instruction and of rules and regulations. A man of calculated risks and ponderings and of worse case scenarios. He had the plan all down pat. He had looked at this picture from every single possible angle. When he got home. He would start his own beginning. He was going to leave.
Beatrice held her own and used her own momentum and love and desire to turn the cogs. Each wheel click moving another click of motion. The intricate clockwork of rotations and cycles leading to something bigger than her. She knew from that moment that Daniel came home and started his own beginning that she never knew when the clock would strike. Or what the clock would read, for that matter.
Daniel, a man of routine and instruction and of rules and regulations. He knew his math was good. He was being logistical. He was finding his own way. When the double strip story trailed off her tongue in the sing-songy way it had twice before he let his emotions cloud the reason. Objective became subjective. His mind couldn’t function that way. It was messy and hazy. It was the beginning, again. Again. Again. Again.
Beatrice saw in his eyes a patterning of a spiral staircase. pupils circling the center and spinning wildly out of control. She reeled and pulled. She worked like a fisherman working his nets working each rope as to not lose her precious breadwinning catch. Her passion for her trade, for her love, was slippery rope slipping through her fingers in a frigid squall like night lost at sea.
It was the beginning, indeed. The beginning of very hard times.
