'For Him' by Debbi Voisey

She didn’t expect it but it came through her window through a chink in the curtain like a crack of thunder or a flash of lightning brought by a bird with black feathers and a beak so sharp it made pin-prick indentations in her chest her heart her mind which was filled with emptiness or cotton wool or sharp tacks that rattled and hurt but not as much as when He came all puckered and screaming and doughy and soft and warm and vulnerable like a delicate glass vase from Murano which was where they were when He was made one drunken night in the city that had gentle waters lapping at its sides like a lover promising the world but breaking it into sneaky little pieces that came away and drifted into the Adriatic Sea just like her dreams of being something anything a long-term wife shattered into tiny fragments of ambition hope togetherness love and bobbed like flotsam on a choppy ocean and what was left of her could do nothing but wait for time to finally settle and show her the beauty she was promised would one day come while she held his head in one hand and his safety and future in another because she was all he had and every crack of thunder and every flash of lightning and every black bird with a sharp beak was her foe to fight for him