Renunciation by Cheryl Snell
It’s the day you’ve been waiting for, I tell him. He looks at me, his expression a question mark. Ash Wednesday, I prompt him. A smile spreads over his face like a sailboat, capsized. Let the renouncing begin. He slides out of bed like a slippery eel– his weight loss the result of a recent year’s renouncing. He burns some toast and scrapes it down, marks his forehead with it. Not with the usual cross, he is not Christian. In fact, he renounced all religion, including the one he was born into, long ago. Is that what triggered this desire to renounce things? I don’t know. I missed the early part of his life. Perhaps I could ask his family, but they renounced both of us for our union, which they found unsuitable. So, maybe it’s genetic.
After breakfast, he pedals his bike to the grocery store and brings back a few basic things. None of them interest me, but that’s not the point. Once home, he settles in at his desk, that is, our dining room table, unused for dinner parties we stopped hosting. He begins to work. Every so often he shouts, “Are you OK?” in the direction of our bedroom where I am eating chocolates and reading travel brochures. I keep my music down low so as not to distract him, and must turn it down even lower to answer him. “Yes. You need something?” Most of the time he can’t hear me unless I stand at the door and aim my words directly downstairs, so we go back and forth with the same Q and A until we’re exhausted. He keeps his hearing aid on the bedside table and I can’t convince him to wear it. I guess he’s renounced that too.
By lunch time, I’m feeling prickly, but I feed us: he gets flatbread with roasted vegetables, salad, and mixed fruit, the same thing every day. The sameness is a bonus for him. Since we renounced restaurants, he doesn’t have to settle for less. I happily bite into my pulled pork sandwich. There are brownies, too, but I won’t eat them in front of him. I don’t trust the strength of renunciation. Is it stronger than chocolate? And I don’t know what kind of force would break through it, and what we would find on the other side. “Have you decided on what you’ll give up this Lent? I ask, mostly to change the subject in my head.
He raises his eyes to mine and they inexplicably fill with tears. “I thought I’d retire,” he says.
Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and the novels of her Bombay Trilogy. Her latest title is a collection of flash fiction called Intricate Things in their Fringed Peripheries. Most recently her writing has appeared in journals from India, UK, Scotland, Canada, Greece, USA, Israel, and elsewhere. She was trained as a classical pianist, and lives in Maryland with her husband, a mathematical engineer.
Painting ‘off his back’ by Janet Snell – janetsnell.weebly.com
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