Peoples Choice 2010: Four Windows, A Door

By Suzannah Newton

In winter the house shivers in the wind. She can hear the glass rattling in its frames and the whistling as it shoots through the gaps in the walls and doors.
Beneath her thick woollen jacket she feels the ice in her bones.
Knitting? Her husband says, what on earth are you knitting for?
Orphans, she replies. The woman’s church group are knitting for orphans and unwanted children.
Hmmmmmph, he says. I’m going to the pub.
The woman doesn’t answer. She sits and knits in the darkening room.
The following morning is tired, grey and curling at the edges; air heavy with fatigue as the woman walks. The old house has lost some of its weatherboards, holes gaping like missing teeth.  She winds the scarf through the twisted wire of the front fence, its bright red like a wound.
Around the letterbox she ties the strings of the hat and bundles into the slot several pairs of socks.
She doesn’t dare leave a note. In fact, for the first time, she leaves as soon as she is done, hurrying away as fast as her thick winter skirts will let her.
It is a Saturday and the next day her husband is home. They play rummy and visit some friends.
On Sunday they go to church and help organise the collection. On the Monday her husband’s boss comes around and she spends all day cooking lamb, baking peach cobbler, moving all the paper gathering dust on the unused table, and practising conversation.
So it is the next Tuesday she visits the old house. If possible it looks more forlorn.
She stares at the broken window and feels her heart crack.
In the letterbox is a little scrap of folded-up paper.
Goodbye Mum, it says
Don’t call anymore.