I'm cheating

I'm cheating. I hope you forgive me.  I'm going to do two posts today because I forgot about The Alliterative Allomorph's internal conflict blogfest.  I really want to enter, hence the double post.

This scene from my WIP takes place the day after the excerpt I posted for the Primal Scream blogfest, so if you want some context go ahead and check that out.  Please note, however, that the following excerpt has been severely edited to get it down to the 800 words required by the internal conflict blogfest.

Here's my entry:

Cold feet, cold hands, cold, cold, cold. I chafed at my bare upper arms, then lunged to my feet and began pacing the room.

“Honey, come here.” My mom grabbed me by the shoulders, directed me until I stood facing my reflection in the full length mirror. “It's your wedding day.  We finally got here and look at how gorgeous you are.”

Instead I looked at her. Strands of her gray hair had pulled free of her French twist and wafted over her temple. The bruise I noticed there the night I picked her up from the airport had all but faded. However, there was still a slight discoloration near the lobe of her ear. It's shape was reminiscent of the ring her current boyfriend wore on his right hand.

I wondered how many men left just such a mark on my mother’s skin, wondered if she kept a tally of hits and kicks and bites and bruises.

I wondered just how many blows it would take before I looked as defeated as my mother.

“I’m not going to do this.” I murmured.

“What, sweetheart?” My mom met my eyes in the mirror. Her eyes were brighter than I’d seen them all weekend, but it was suspicion and a dawning anger that glowed through the haze of alcohol, not pride or hope.

I held her eyes in the mirror, feeling my mom’s need to have me settled, to feel she’d done her duty by me crushing my resistance. The weight of expectation from the fifty or so guests most likely already seated and waiting for the bride to arrive seemed to filter through the wall, shoving at my shoulders, my waist, my legs, forcing me to move toward the door, then around the corner, down the aisle to David’s side. I thought of the world he belonged to, the world of education, art, culture, travel, money, the world I’d been seeking a way into perhaps my whole life as I scrabbled away from the stigma of 5515 Somerset Lane. I thought of David, how much, despite all, I still loved him.

“I’m going to do this and it will be alright.” I told the shaken looking pixie cut blond peering out at me from behind the mask of her veil.

“Damn right.” My mother said. “Now let’s go.”

We left the room together. Once in the hall my mom poked her head around the corner. “Set to go, folks.”

Then my mom offered me her arm. A moment later we rounded the corner and paused just outside the room where I was to be wed. Craning my head around the doorjamb I peered in and saw David smiling, so brilliant to look at him made my eyes ache. I watched him gesture as he talked to the minister, thought of his hands wielding the scissors the night before, the tip of them coming within centimeters of the jelly of my eyeball, convincing me to be quiescent while he took away pieces of me.

The string quartet eased into the strains of The Bridal Chorus and all the guests got to their feet, turning toward the door. I jerked my head out of sight. My mother straightened, lifting her chin, throwing her shoulders back. My gaze returned to the small bruise near the lobe of her ear.

My mind then ran over the course of my relationship with David, seeing the small toxic ways that fiend lurking behind the wall of his self control seeped into my life and tainted it. I didn’t need to use my precognition to see it would continue to do so. That I would end up exactly like my mother, except comparing the abuse David would mete out over the course of our relationship with what my father had done to my mother was like comparing what happened in an army field hospital to the work of a brain surgeon. One was mindless butchery, a brutal whacking and hacking and then onto the next. The other was a fine tuned skill, an exquisite manipulation of the organ upon which everything else depended. That was David’s particular method, a tearing down that began from within until there was nothing left but a hollow shell.

I reached under the veil with my free hand, fingered my cropped hair and wondered even now, how much of me was left to destroy. How much there would be to salvage if I ever decided to leave him. If he would let me go.

My vision went fuzzy and vague at the edges and it felt like all the oxygen in the world wouldn’t be enough to inflate the vacuum of my lungs. I yanked my arm from my mother’s, staggered back a few steps.

She reached for me. “Ruth?”

I clutched up huge handfuls of my wedding gown. Then I kicked off my heels and ran.