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Show -14- Now, she thinks, it will happen right now, she sees the veins in his throat standing out, but she hears some other voice in her cry, no! "Get away from me before I kill you!" he yells, his throat black red. She can see his pulse pumping wild in his veins. "You want me to die!" Now, she thinks, now! The old fierce voice cries out too: no--, but she can no longer listen. She hears someone's scream. a long time afterwards, she sees he is gone. Gone too are the two jolly daughters; only the youngest sits in the dining room, hour after hour, staring at the mahogany surface of the table. "It cannot be," the daughter eventually whispers, a woman now, the last, perhaps, in a long line of sadness. Her mother simply sits where she sits, a graying old woman, knotting her hands in the frayed lace of a boot. She can speak only a single lost word, over and over. When she says it she curls back her lips, as if to copy the smile that he taught her. |