The pink, satin dress

Emily couldn’t fit into the pink, satin dress; it felt tight around her chest and hips. Last year it had fit her voluptuous body wonderfully, accentuating her fine figure, but this year was an entirely different beast all together. She frowned deeply as she struggled, looking in the full-length mirror, feeling disgusted with herself. All those fast food meals and late night snacks had not done her justice, and it didn’t help that she drank beer more often than she should, almost daily in fact. If her late husband Bill had still been around he would have told her that she still looked beautiful, she was everything that he wanted her too be. Too bad he’d had a skiing accident last January-during their anniversary no less-and was no more than a memory, a photo on the mantle that smiled benevolently down at her and her current pain. He hadn’t been the perfect husband but she had been happy with him nonetheless.

“Son of a bitch.” She muttered, slumping to the floor and a flood of tears washed down her face, blurring her image of herself into a million tiny fragments. “You fucking bastard.”

She knew she couldn’t really be mad at him but still she was. He had been drunk, had been drinking heavily over the course of the entire weekend.

“It’s my only vacation this year babe,” He’d said, tipping back another bottle of Molson’s at the ski lodge bar, the dim lighting making his ruddy complexion look almost robust. “I’m entitled to enjoy myself.”

She tried not to complain, tried to be a good wife and take it all in stride. All year long he did work hard, always working late, working more Saturday’s than not. If they had had children maybe that would have been a different story but since her third miscarriage they had sort of given up hope and got a dog instead, a little fox terrier that barked at everything that moved, living or not. They would hear Beethoven barking at the front door and roll their eyes.

“Leaves must be blowing across the yard again, or maybe he picked up the scent of a squirrel two doors down.” Bill would joke before yelling ‘knock it off!’, much to her eternal chagrin.

“He’s a dog, he doesn’t know any better.” She would defend the little mutt and go and see what was riling him up.

Beethoven had been staying with a friend of theirs that weekend last year, and when Emily had come back alone he had comforted her while she cried, licking the tears as they rolled down her face. She’d hugged the poor little thing so tight she almost asphyxiated him, but still he stayed by her side.

They say bad luck comes in threes, that one bad thing will most surely lead to another, and this year was nothing short of spectacular on that end. In the midst of her depression she had let Beethoven out one night to go potty-after she’d had seven beers combined with several shots of Irish whisky-and forgotten him out there. The next morning found her calling his name over and over until in the dim recesses of her memory she recalled his late night bathroom break. Heart thudding in her chest she quickly threw on her coat and boots and, after no more then a few minutes found him frozen to death in the snow by one of the rear basement windows which he had apparently been trying to paw open after unsuccessfully rousing his owner by barking at the back door. In a panic she put him in a Hefty bag and buried him in a mound of snow. Come spring thaw-when the black bag became prominent in the back yard-she officially buried him in the rose garden that was no longer a rose garden because, like people and animals, they needed water to survive.

On the day Bill died they had been laughing and joking on the ski-lift, Bill making an ass of himself, a spectacle in front of the other skiers, embarrassing her to no end.

“Nice coat ya fairy!” Bill harassed a thin, mousy looking man in a blaze orange parka with pink trim around the collar and sleeves. “Did yer gay lover buy you that?”

Bill wasn’t normally so crude; it was the alcohol talking more than he. But you know how it is with alcohol, it allows people to behave how they really want to but won’t let themselves. She always knew that he was secretly homophobic and had once-in a drunken crying binge-confessed to her why that was: he had been molested by one of his uncles as a child. At the age of ten he had found himself face down on the shag carpet at uncle Craig’s house, his pants around his ankles, his rectum lubricated with saliva as the drunken, hairy man moved vigorously above him, breathing foul breath on the back of his neck, making grunting noises more suited for a barnyard animal than a man. Because of that incident Bill also had trouble urinating publicly; if another man was in a public bathroom he would have to use a stall and even then could only go if he was sitting down, aiming his penis for the rim of the bowl so that the urine didn’t make any splashing sound in the water. Sometimes it affected their social life because it gave Bill a tremendous aversion to places that didn’t have doors on the stalls, places like music clubs.

At the top of the peak they had beheld a panoramic view of the valley below, the fresh white snow so lovely, so clean. Their breath plumed out before them as they adjusted their skis, a light dusting of flurries falling gently in the calm, early afternoon air. The last thing she ever said to her husband, her lover, her best friend, was: “Don’t be such an ass Bill.”

She said this in response to his suggestion that they go down a double diamond headwall, a descent neither of them were skilled enough to attempt.

“See ya at the bottom!” He opined, pushing off and away from her forever. The last thing she saw of him was his backside, the last sound she heard him make a loud “Yahoo!” followed several seconds later by a blood-curdling scream that would haunt her dreams there after. When the paramedics got to him one of them vomited, splattering the nice clean snow a nasty yellow color. They had advised her against looking at the corpse, saying that the rocks had done extensive facial damage.

The funeral, of course, had been closed casket.

And now, as she sat on the floor of their bedroom, struggling to fit into the dress she had worn to their anniversary dinner and failing, she felt the desperate throes of depression sink it’s teeth into her, felt herself growing weak and tired.

After Bill had died and after she had accidentally killed the dog, the third unlucky incident slowly unraveled. As she sunk deeper and deeper into her own misery she became less aware of others around her, her friends, her family. They had all tried to reach out to her but she was out of grasp, so when her mother died of breast cancer it would just so happen that she hadn’t even talked to her in over three months. Her sister June had called her one hot, humid morning in July, crying, and between sobs Emily slowly gathered what had happened, realizing with dawning horror that she couldn’t even remember when the last time was that she had told her mother that she loved her. The woman who had raised her, taught her how to stand up for herself, told her what it was to be a lady, well, she was now nothing but a black and white photo in an old, dusty photo album.

Emily wiped her arm across her tear-splattered face, grimly looked at herself in the mirror. Today was the first day of the rest of her life. She had told her doctor that she suffered from anxiety and insomnia after her husband’s death and he had given her a prescription for Valium. Today she intended to take the entire bottle, chased down with whisky. If she somehow survived, well, she would consider moving on with her life but, if she didn’t, than she would be with Bill, Beethoven and her mother once again.

All she wanted was to just fit into this damned dress, because she thought she would look so lovely in it when they buried her…