Rosemary and Rue | His Goods, His Chattel, His Anything

It makes my blood boil hearing it all. Their damn shorthand talks and the 'what-could-have-beens' spilling from the dirty mouths of the towners. Everyone now knows I'm the cuckolded idiot -  a placeholder until he decided to take her back from me.

Photo by Frederik Löwer on Unsplash

He didn't need the ocular proof. Trapped by his own mind, his imagination thrived in the shadows, conjuring ghosts where there were none.

He saw exactly what he wanted to see, fixating on his deepest dread until it became the only thing he saw - until it finally stared back at him from the mirror.

Jealousy led him by the nose as tenderly as asses are. It turned every stray silence into a confession of guilt - proof as strong as holy writ.

Withdrawn and impenetrable. He locked himself in his study, the latch more secure than any prison cell. It was a cage that held them both - within and without. It anchored him in his darkness while shutting her, coldly, out of his life.

That room was no longer an extension of the home they shared, but an annex of his own dread.

Chaos and neglect. It reeked of stagnant tobacco, fusty and musky, and cluttered with a graveyard of finished and unfinished coffee. He refused to let anyone enter, not even to clean his room.

It was his calculated intent to keep his wife out. He needed his space. No labor of small talk and no unwanted eye contact.

When he finally emerged, the air between them would grow thin and distant. The space between them turned into a frozen, sunless hell where all warmth had been violently snuffed out - as if the intimacy they once shared had never existed at all.

The dinners with laughter and the date nights were replaced by nothingness.

He wouldn't even hold her hand.

If she reached for him - out of habit of their better days - he would flinch. Violently. It was as if she'd pulled a dagger for a game of finger roulette, and he was terrified she'd actually maim his hand.

She tiptoed on eggshells like a ghost in her own house, perpetually braced for his next outburst. She was the translucent kind of ghost - one you could see through and reach through its vaporous mist to touch the wall behind.

Drifting, fading, nearly invisible; she probably didn't even try to look into the mirror anymore.

Her life had become a grim theater. Dark. Exhausting. Mandatory.

She performed like her life depended on it. She wore that brittle, fake smile just to keep the housekeeper and her father convinced that their perfectly splendid life was still intact.

Meanwhile, she kept sweeping the mounting ash under the rug. She was tired. But she didn't stop. Her stage was one sudden movement away from shattering into a thousand pieces.

He began living out of his car or anonymous motels.

If he'd spent the night in his car, he'd slip into the house at dawn. The only sound heard was the shower hitting the floor, washing off the road. He would change into fresh clothes before he vanished into the workday again. Like a ghost he came in and like a ghost he left, always quiet, always gone.

If he'd stayed in a motel, he would head to work directly from there, wearing the same clothes for days on end.

Two ghosts, drifting through parallel universes within the same four walls.

On the rare nights he actually stayed for dinner, the silence would shatter and her heart would break. His verbal abuse crushed her underfoot.

Jagged remarks were side dishes he served up to humiliate her in front of her father.

He would push the food around his plate with performative disgust, actively searching for a flaw in the seasoning or a texture to condemn - a cruel contradiction to the praise he'd once heaped upon her cooking.

Everything she said came out wrong; he saw to it by twisting her words into knots. He mocked everything, even the way she sang. It was a slow, deliberate poisoning, turning her simple joy into a shameful act. She stopped. She didn't want sing anymore.

This wasn't the man who had once vowed to love her completely, nor the one who had sworn to her all the holy promises of heaven. He wasn't her husband at all; she didn't know him, anymore.

In truth, even a total stranger would have treated her with more decency than this. Now, there was only a gray emptiness where that man used to stand.

Things finally cracked. No grand explosion, just a silent, slow spiderwebbing suffocation.

Please read the following paragraph entirely in one breath. Do not pause:

A slow death, steeped in a hopeless dread. The air grew heavy and stagnant, in a slow creep, thick with misery-weight of a thousand unspoken apologies that would never come. It dragged across the floorboards with the grating agonizing friction of a persistent heartbeat held back by regret - that refused to stop even as the body began to dissociate from its own living warmth. A slow-motion dissolution. Minutes stretched into days, then into countless lifetimes of waiting for the void to swallow one up along with the very memories of what had been, leaving behind nothing but the cold, Frankensteinic carcass of a marriage in a slow, never-ending death.

The day came when he leveled a dead-eyed stare at her and stated flatly, "I love you not." The words struck her like a poisoned dirge, a blade slicing through her flesh, the venom searing through her veins.

He now lived in the dark, a man who had long ago asked the stars to hide the fires of his own black and deep desires. Every past vow, every touch, now felt like a cruel irony as if they were just part of a grand, cruel lie.

When she finally demanded a divorce, he met the request with a cold, vacant silence. He didn't even look at her.

In his eyes, she was no longer a woman to be loved, but a possession - his goods, his chattel, his anything. To him, she was merely the latest in a long line of betrayals, following the ghosts of his mother and his former lovers.

The belittling and denigrating continued behind closed doors. Trapped in a marriage that existed in name only, he wouldn't leave, and he refused to let her go.

He held no further regard for her, for he was convinced the wound was beyond remedy. Still, he would not abandon his vows; he would certainly honor them, albeit in a different way.

What was done was done, and their union - valid in sickness and in death - would only end when both of them were finally carried out of that door, blue and cold, in a body bag.

What was done could not be undone; her betrayal was a permanent stain requiring a permanent penance, and he was determined that she, and she alone, should be the one to bear the full, crushing weight of the cross that their life had become.

Peering through the window from the street, it was like watching a black-and-white film played on mute in a pantomime of domestic decay.

They were living in a damned, confusing existence: two ghosts pacing a stage of wedded purgatory, lost in a shared silence.

©Britt H.

Thank you for reading this.

More about the person behind the writing in My Introductory Post

If you’d like to support my writing — you can consider buying me a coffee here Any support holds immense significance for a disabled neurodivergent like me.