‘Neverender’ by Krista Jane May

The wind, the wind, the wind blows high, toss — 

“Hey! Lorena! If you’re not doing anything, how about a fresh pot of coffee?”

What William — shouting from behind the closed door of his study — is really saying is: Stop what you’re doing. It’s not important like what I’m doing and I want coffee. Now. Make some.

He’s not entirely wrong. Lorena is, after all, merely standing in the bathroom, pondering the oak-framed portrait above the sink. She’s looking closely. Brown spots on cheeks, creases around mouth, puffiness surrounding dull, weary eyes. Loose skin at the neck drapes in folds that disappear into a cavern of a throat; it looks as if one could crawl in there and never find one’s way out.

How is it possible, she wonders, that a woman can look this way on the outside yet inside feel like a hapless, half-grown child? Surely a face so portrayed is worthy of one who has gained — if not exactly admiration — a place of respect, something she’s certain the woman who displays it has not. But the reflected lines don’t lie: this woman has clearly lived the number of years required to obtain such spectacular results. Yet it surprises — sometimes shocks — her whenever she studies this face. She believes the woman who wears it hasn’t earned one bit of it.

Tossing Lor-e-na through the sky — 

But coffee. Right. She turns to leave the bathroom, then stops. 

She’d allowed it to happen, of course. She won’t cry about it, and she’d be ashamed to share her thoughts with even her closest of friends who, in any case, have dwindled to rather few.