black dresses. However, the Black Widow kills its male partner, but I’m going to have someone else do that part for me, and then my babies’ll eat me.What a way to go! Pretty exotic though, and very un-traditional. Well, God, I do hope he doesn’t come back dead. A house and a car, a television and a lawnmower: all of our possessions left to me. I don’t really want to be alone in the house though, with people pityingly visiting me, bringing cake and cards and flowers. I would live a funeral every day. Like Susannah Dakryon, a friend I once had. A proud and open relationship with a sailor had led her to believe that she was at the height of her social class. The fact was, though, that she was Greek and could clearly be linked to her father’s involvement on the communist side during the civil war.This was a problem for some, but I and other comrades of the group ignored this fact. She was fun, when she wasn’t slurring on her martini or talking louder than everyone else at a party. And then she became pregnant. For a while she drank and smoked and then stopped, finally realising that gin wasn’t the best thing for foetuses. That was until she realised they were triplets - and then they died, all three. The Sailor ran away to prep for Vietnam as soon as he could. She was left ill, weak and empty. She stood like a dead tree in her doorway all day, but her house was bare and quiet. The last time I saw her was in the local mall. All that was in her trolley was white makeup, red cigarettes, brown whiskey. Her face was a mask of twisted waxed powders and her lips were the colour of pomegranate seeds: a shell of a person. My God, what if I were left a shell? I don’t want to be left as just a person without soul, sucked away by some pointless, selfish movement fromThe Fates, just left to rot in my prim and proper house, without purpose or motion. I would sit, looking into a
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