THE OTHER WIDOW - Karen

I grew up near the ocean. I loved the sea. I even thought I was a mermaid that got lost somehow and ended up on land. There was peace in the sound of the waves, the circling gulls, the hum of the South Beach bus. They drowned out all the harsher sounds of home and made me want to go, to fly. Everywhere. Anywhere.

I think they are there still, pieces of the past, preserved, the dead alive, the silenced voices singing me away. The parts of me that overlap with Karen Dempsey are in her memories of a cardboard house with hard blue rugs.

  She closes her eyes, and sees his face, and then, for just a fraction of a second, she sees her father’s face, the round white moon of it, shining through a murky window, her father, ripping through the early fabric of her life. Preparing her. Setting her up. For this. For the lie that was her husband. – The Other Widow