Usual disclaimers apply.

POLLYANNA by Jayne Leitch

C. 2003

Elizabeth remembers being cynical. She used to swagger through life dressed in contemptuous black, rolling her eyes at anyone who pretended to care, curling her lips around her parents’ lectures and the forbidden cigarettes that prompted them. Elizabeth didn’t see that she had many options back then, living in Sarah’s perfect shadow, so with a general air of low-key spitefulness she smirked and turned everything into a joke or an ashtray, telling herself that since that was her life, that was how she was going to live it.

She doesn’t remember exactly when things changed. She’s always thought that should be easy to pin down, maybe by assigning it to one of the other important moments in her life-the day her rapist was arrested, or the day she realized she’d fallen in love with Lucky, or the day she married Ric...

But no matter how hard she tries, no matter how many defining moments she examines and re-examines in memory, in hindsight, in wistfully-tinted rosy shades, she can’t pin down the day she gave up cynicism. All she knows is that she thought the change was for the better; so much better to be able to love openly and trust honestly, to be able to take the edge out of her smile, to finally lose the craving for cigarette smoke in her lungs because the warm scent of Ric’s body is the best thing she’s ever breathed.

Elizabeth remembers being cynical. Now, with Ric’s face rough with stubble and wet with tears against her neck, his soft voice breaking as he clutches the pillow and says he has to kill her because he needs a brother more than a wife, she wonders why she ever stopped.

End.

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