Perhaps that’s what Hell is, a long term in earth-bound bondage. Perhaps we suffer our hells in living….
Not that she was a saint, or indeed anything more than most. Only that she never complained, that she had the gift—or was it the curse?—of acceptance. No matter what had gone or what might come, she confronted it and accepted it, stored it away to fuel the furnace of her being.
The wurrst sign a woman can find herself born into, Mrs. Smith darlin’. Och, they’re children of the Devil, so they are!
It didn’t matter what anyone else thought, it didn’t, it didn’t!
Light and empty as the air so alluringly full of marine tang and sun-soaked vegetation, he drifted for a while on the wings of a different kind of freedom: the relief of relinquishing his mandate to fight her, the peace of losing a long, incredibly bloody war and finding the surrender far sweeter than the battles.