I was going through some of my old prose and found a document dated 1999 that I had entitled “short story ideas” and I had written pieces of prose. I always meant to go back and expand on these. So strange to look at something I wrote 9 years ago …
Here is one of them:
She knew she was dreaming but it didn’t really matter. Painful images were going through her head … of him with her, of him leaving a party with another woman, telling her that it’s okay because they’re just friends, and it’s only sex anyway.
When she woke her nightgown was twisted around her waist and she was almost sideways in the bed. When she heard his voice she wanted to hit him, even though it was a dream. His offer to cook her breakfast made her want to vomit, and she made her way to the bathroom without saying a word to him.
She takes a bubble bath in the morning, even though it’s supposed to make her relax rather than invigorate her. She always hated the mornings, and the thought of standing underneath a shower would only add to the unpleasantness. So in the mornings she bathed, sometimes for 15 minutes, sometimes for an hour. It made her feel like all the nightmares would fall out of her brain and into the water, only to go underground where they belonged.
She was really quite lazy, she decided. But that really didn’t matter so much to her.