After Words by Nadine Sellers

The scraping of metal against metal grated in the darkness. By the simple act of locking the bedroom door she was symbolically cutting herself off to spite her vagina.     She walked softly to the conjugal bed, and stared at the opacity of the chamber. Feeling words of steel etched on the drapes of thought that poured over her. He staggered toward the guest haven and slammed the door shut before purposely grinding the locking mechanism to an excruciating resonance.     Breathing sounds from the guest room seemed punishment enough for her. The imposed asylum became a tacit retreat from ambient misery.     Their castrated souls suffering in unison, they ached their way through the remainder of the night, barely living. Owning their pain in estranged sentiment, heavy upon their breast. She, curled in a twisted mass naked beneath the sheets. He, prone and fully clothed in rigid length upon the day bed.     Eyes now closed, hers, a pool of lacrymal effusion, his, dry salt from a single stubborn tear. the silence of midnight screamed afterthoughts above the house. Echoes of words drifted in and out of consciousness. till exhaustion or intoxication claimed them to oblivion.     Empty hands reached into cold air, legs immobile, she swallowed hard to recover a voice in a culture of deafness. The mass in her throat tight as a gizzard forbade words to exit. Welling forgiveness cried through swells of pity, embroiled in past-present-future confusion.     Angry hands stretched stiff above his head, frustration sinking into primordial mud of a cursed conscience. Abandoned perennially by those he depended upon, he swallowed despair as bitter brew, vowing to self never to trust the female soul.     Words of love unspent, words of sympathy unheeded collided in translation, throbbing and ebbing on foreign shores. Words erased by dawn, now invisible scars of emotional sclerosis.

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