All Words Should Ring True and Evident | Fortune Flash Friday #002
Flash fiction about speaking your mind in a bad relationship.
If she was honest with herself - which he rarely was with anyone - she was never really that sure about their relationship. They had met on a blind date during what she regarded as a low point in the series of low points that was her mid 20s.
The first date first impression left something of a sour taste in her mouth; she found his laugh irritating, his pictures incredibly misleading about the extent to which he could sustain an interesting conversation, and just generally a little cheated by the lonely hearts classified. Once her good friend Stella had muttered a word into the ear in her gullet, however, her opinion softened.
She lay there the morning after her birthday, staring up at the cracks and the mildew on the ceiling above them for what felt like eternity. Breath by breath, her lungs filling with the dank air of the room, she was overcome with an overwhelming emptiness. Neither joy nor frustration came about as she called upon every fibre in her being to muster up an emotional response to the man lying next to her as he had done for so long now.
On that morning, in spite of her indifference, something shifted. For the first time in their relationship, he went out of his way to ask her what was on her mind. He re-assured her that he wanted to know what was really going on behind the wall she had erected. So she told him.
“Nothing,” she muttered, at which point she turned to look him in the eyes, “I have been snookered by your idiocy.”