Marta's collapsed on the divan in the front room where the children generally are not allowed, a washcloth soaked in vinegar across her forehead, over her eyes, too weak to make the trip to the medicine cabinet for aspirins. They wouldn't make any difference anyway.She feels shameful, trembling, a pain in her lower abdomen turning her disgust around and around, barely 9:30 in the morning and she's already lying down. That's what her husband would say, half joking but completely oblivious, chalking it up to yet another "woman thing," about which he has no understanding and doesn't even try to understand because it is simply beyond his ability.
Marta manages to pull the cloth off of her head, with great effort lifts her left arm up from the side of the divan -- her hand lightly resting on the floor on its knuckles -- and swipes the moist cloth downward like she's cleaning a counter or a small electric appliance. She had convinced herself that the migraine was subsiding, that the heavy metallic pain behind her left eye and creeping in an arch across the left side of her skull was gone, that the left and right sides were the same again, that she could pull her hair back again, pin it back, look normal, get back to the day.
But she was wrong. A sudden move, no matter how slight, brings it all back again, a paper cut, a smashed finger in a car door, a bruised knee from a fall on the steps, a too-tight girdle pinching at her waist, all these things could pull her apart, expose her gristle, lay her bare, wasted and useless, but none more so than a headache.
The room is lit with green-gray light seeping lazily through the drapes. A storm is coming, the pressure was what had likely caused the headache. It happens more and more lately. If she could get the cloth back to her head she would feel better. Her hand trembles and her head strains, as if all the muscles in her body were attached to that point in the left side of her head, tightly wound, pinched nerves, pinched muscles, pinched flesh, bones pulled tight against one another; "tightly wound," that's what she is, that's what her husband had called her and the image comes to her clearly all of a sudden in this moment.
The gleeful children outside run past the window, hers and some others. A jet airplane flies through her, cuts open her flesh and muscles, burns through her and for a split second she hates her children, hates her husband, hates herself. A self-pitying tear pools up at the corner of her eye, halted by the bridge of her nose until it is big enough, heavy enough to spill out, run down the side of her nose, across her cheek, into her ear. It is hot.
There is only the one tear. She isn't often in the habit of feeling sorry for herself. Who has the time?!
Marta notices something under the coffee table, next to one of its legs. A dark glob-- a tarantula spider readying to jump her dangling hand! She forgets herself for a moment, leans with the throbbing, closer until the shadows move enough to reveal it to be a dried up flower, just the head, its petals crippled and crinkled like dirty lace around a bobbin. A flower from the last arrangement given to her by her husband, months ago on her birthday. Quite a surprise. She didn't expect anything of the sort from him. Her love for him deepened and solidified by that simple gesture.
She rallies herself to move further, reaches out and catches the dead flower head between two fingertips, awkwardly carries it back, shaking, perspiring, to her right hand resting on her chest. She hands it over then lets her left hand fall back hard on its knuckles against the brightly polished wooden floor. The flower crackles in her hand, against her breast. She falls asleep and dreams of her husband as a boy, before she knew him, before the headaches started their regular visits.
