RUTH (A NARRATIVE)

*********** RUTH **********

He sat all crumpled up in his brand new, one week old wheel chair. His gnarled right hand quivered upon the metal armrest. His skin had turned all burnished and leathery in just 7 days of suffering a stroke. A hesitant tear stood in one eye defying gravity and the beckoning by a twitching and slightly twisted mouth.

He was a hairy man, and his ageing stubble glistened as the sun bathed his sweaty jaws.

Ruth approached him, blade in one hand and a tube of shaving foam in the other.

For the first time in their 30yr marriage, she was unafraid of making a mistake while shaving her master....her husband...her god!

There was no hand to slap her senseless or punch her in the belly, were she to apply too much foam or cut him slightly.

She inhaled the air of freedom and felt the romantic fingers of the sun on her face.

As gently as ever, she applied the cream all over his jaw, tilting his face upward to reveal an Adam's apple that bobbed from fear and sickness.

He squinted a glare from an invalid eye and caught the face of his darling Ruth. She tried to smile but a broken nose from his fist in drunken rage turned her face into a grotesque mask. Her lips parted and broken teeth from his kicks peeped out of scarred lips.

The blade sighed in a swish as she ran it over her palm. He closed his eyes and resigned his fate to the hand that held the blade.....the hand that held life and death...fuelled by vengeance.

The razor travelled over his throat severally. He couldn't change a thing now. He couldn't show her he loved her. His muscles were too diseased to touch her tenderly. He wanted to say sorry for all the years of abuse, but the neurological accident in his brain had paralysed his tongue. He couldn't stop her now.

It was too late. She was omnipotent. His slave had become his god.

Tears rolled from his eyes to the sides of his head. A teardrop hung from his ear lobe and another tear from above dropped like a paratrooper and crashed into it. She was weeping too.

She loved her broken heartless husband.

KUNLE OMOPE.

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