New Endings

Emily Knapp was a quiet, tired girl. She had just turned twenty-six last week, but she carried the worries of a mother and a wife, of a Protestant and a woman. She carried two beautiful exhausting twins who were not quiet and tired at all like her, but instead loud and wild and inquisitive like their father, who was at war in the South Pacific.

She wore faded dresses with washed out lilacs and daisies with torn slips from the Salvation Army. The babies always had nice, new clothes, but that was because her mother always paid for them. She never wore makeup anymore, except for a little eyeliner which was a habit she had begun at fifteen and never been able to break. Her hair, which had once been a proud collection of beautiful ringlets that shone like spun gold, now carried the complexion of dried straw and was always pulled back into a tight but simple ponytail.

She sighed often.

Like right now for instance. Emily rose from the tiny dining room table where she had been sitting and sighed quietly before moving into the kitchen and searching through her purse for a handkerchief to dry her eyes. She couldn't find the handkerchief at first, just blush and matches and receipts from the market and all sorts of things that suddenly seemed very in her way and very useless and so she snatched up her purse in frustration and tipped it over the counter, shaking out it's contents until a white square finally floated out from her bag and landed atop the mess.

Looking up from the counter-top and into the living room, Emily's plain gray eyes could see both her children, each with their father's dark curls and curious green eyes, sitting atop their blanket and pushing blocks across the floor at each other, giggling. She dabbed at the tears under her eyes then, careful not to smudge her eye makeup before tucking the handkerchief into the front pocket of her apron, out of sight but not far from reach.

Watching the twins, she began to think of when the babies had first been born and then she quietly began to recite Jackson's letter in her head, as she often had before when feeling grief that their children had not yet met their wonderful father, the father who would be able to teach them things and make them smile. He would surely be a better parent than she was; more patient. 'They are incredible darling.” He wrote, “So beautiful that I will carry the picture you sent inside my helmet until the day I come home to meet them, I promise.' She thinks of the letter and how he had also assured her, as he did in every note, that he was being safe, and that he would be home soon, but then she couldn't help but think of the yellow telegram that sat on her dining table and the two children before her who were now without a father and she felt quite suddenly as if he had been playing a gigantic trick on her all along.

She thought of all the twilight's of dawn she had spent crying, and the exhausting days of working at a factory and grocery shopping and always setting four places at the table when there were only three of them. She thought of how long it had been since she'd been able to fall asleep before three in the morning and how some days she fantasized about just running away, leaving the babies with her parents and disappearing. She thought about the bruise on her son's arm from when she had grabbed him too hard when he was crying in the supermarket and how Jackson would never, ever have done such a thing.

But now Jackson was dead and she was all alone, and very tired. Emily tucked away these thoughts into the darkest parts of her mind and reached into a cabinet above her head to grab a bottle of Gin, deciding to mix herself just one drink before starting dinner.