Anniversary

It is eleven o’clock and Bride’s dress is torn and she knows that if she does not mend the shoulder tonight she will be unable to do so in the morning. She will be unable to wear the garment ever again and the sight of it on her sewing chair, frayed and decumbent, will only depress her. It will remind her, when she would like nothing better than to entirely forget the consummation of this tear and go about pretending that the sleeve had not been pulled from the shoulder. Better now to patch and stitch at night before the whole dress unravels; a heap of loose thread will never do. Things seem so utterly irreparable in the light of day.
Groom snores and the chop of his snore sounds as though he is choking on his soft palate. It is a girding and returnless sound and it fills each part of the bedroom without prejudice. If the noise were to give out, Bride will know that either Groom is buoying infirmly between sleep and cognition, or that his breathing has stopped completely. She does not consider former or latter and hopes instead for the droning to continue on through the night and most of the day and that when he finally surfaces he will be resplendent and new.
Bride wonders if Groom dreams.
As she works the dress down over her mid-section, Bride watches herself in the mirror hanging on the door of her chiffonier. The light is thin but there enough, coming naked from a streetlight through the blinds. When she peels the fabric back along the widest part of her hip, she stops. She sees. Floating in the airless silver circle of the mirror, a plainness; the walls and the windows bending in and a face as muted as her breath. The eyes are dark spangles, unrecognizable, and she cannot move them into something familiar. She blinks and they do not change, arresting her with the feeling of untried discovery. They are deeper than her other two dimensions and where they bottom out she does not know. The back of the room. The back of her mind. The bed. The. Bride rakes wispy fingers through her tired hair, folding it behind her ears and smoothing it above her shoulders. Bits of it pull loose, and in the dim glow of the streetlight the wiry strands are the same tincture as her black, colorless eyes. Bride draws the hairs out and wonders where the years have gone and mutters under her breath, Mercy.
She steps free and the dress rumples quickly and quietly to the floor. Bride flicks on a small brassy light and clambers through the top drawer of her chiffonier until she finds the proper thread and needle. Groom rolls onto his back and snores with more force. From her sewing chair, Bride looks over her lap and over the room and into his mouth as it gapes and maws before she puts a basting stitch to the fabric. It is cooling fast, the warmth from her body no longer working to preserve it, and before long the dress will be a vague, heatless nap to her hands. Bride works nimbly now, but the lavender and white oleander pattern of the cloth makes the process slow going and soon she loses focus. As she bobs the needle through the ragged shoulder, Bride does not think about the long and circular motion that she weaves. She does not yet realize that the seam will not hold. All she can see is her husband’s breath moving in and out, in and out, and when she closes her eyes she hears his stale, fetid voice whisper, I do, I really do, and then him coming down heavy upon her.