He turned his back to her, walked out the door, left her standing there.
Alone, her hoop skirt gently moving by her side, shaken from the disturbance of his right leg.
Her hair perfectly curled and pulled together, shiny ringlets dangling past her neck, pale face with bright rosy cheeks, a quick pulse. Her hand reaches for the back of the love seat, and she guides herself into a chair of china blue, and shiny polished wood. She must sit because her tiny waist insists upon pushing against the corset inside her dress, and her heavy panting will cause her to faint.
Her hands shake, the delicate fingers fondle her wedding ring. She does not understand; a woman of her stature must keep her composure. \'Tis not proper for a wife to speak out of turn against her husband.
Sit up, back straight. Remain dignity and poise. Alone in the room she felt the presence of him, of society, of her mother\'s stern face. The memory of her mother\'s tense serinity after a slap across the face from her husband.
She shortens her breathe, and for a moment is calm, collected- a pebble rolling gently on the shore, carressed by the ocean waves, unobjecting to natural circumstances.
But the shadow of solitude descends. She hears the sound of the breakfast room without Robert; silence. He departed only moments before. She had been alone in their house before. Infact, that very room...
But upon sensing it was the last time she would gaze upon him, the room felt stale, and the air suffocating.
The letters would come, she knew. And she would send her love folded inside a wax sealed envelope. That is how she would spend her days from now on- sitting in the study, mid day, the sun streaming in on the polished wooden writing desk. Dipping her pen in the ink, forming loops and curves on the page, filling it with her daily activities, and regards from his mother (and later careful not to mention the baby growing inside her).
She didn\'t know or understand war - what it was, and why the south and the north split apart like a seed ready to burst. She didn\'t understand or care. She didn\'t invision the crowded barracks, the rats running over the dead bodies. She didn\'t see starvation or wounded bodies. She didn\'t see sweltering heat or frostbitten toes trudging through snow. She didn\'t see the river of blood from a 14 - year old boy\'s head. She couldn\'t hear the shells rocketing. She couldn\'t feel thick clouds of dust rising and sticking in throats and filling lungs. She couldn\'t imagine how it changed people\'s lives forever. She only knew she was standing in two newly - wed\'s empty house, with a few broken memories; her hopes and joys for the future shattered the moment he said, \"I\'ve enlisted in the confederate army.\"
A shot calling for honor, justice and bravery rang in the distance, and she knew he was gone forever.
