The Empty Chair
The onions had just begun to turn translucent when Marianne felt it—a fist closing somewhere behind her sternum, slow and deliberate, as if someone had reached inside her chest and decided, quite calmly, to make a point.
She set down the wooden spoon. Gripped the edge of the counter instead, the way she might once have gripped the edge of a crib rail at three in the morning, steadying herself against something that wanted to knock her over.
"Not now," she said aloud, to no one, because there was no one. There hadn't been anyone to say things aloud to in this kitchen for a long while, and she'd gotten used to narrating her own evenings like a woman keeping herself company in a foreign country where she didn't speak the language. *Not now, not tonight, I have chicken on the stove.*
The pain did not care what she had on the stove.
It spread outward from that first tight fist, down her left arm in a way she recognized only because she'd seen it dramatized on television a hundred times, some actor clutching his chest in a hospital drama while violins swelled underneath him. There was no violin here. There was only the hiss of onions catching too long in oil, and the tick of the…
