Ichneumon eumerus by Andrew McCallum Crawford published by Interlitq - The International Literary Quarterly

Ichneumon eumerus

  

Mindy was fifty-four years old and had never achieved anything on her own. She knew she was being hard on herself; she had a good job in middle-management and had married well. In other words, she lived in a big house with a husband and two lovely children. However, at work she was no more than a cog in a wheel, and marriage by definition is a partnership, a joint venture. It wasn’t her work or domestic arrangements that were on her mind. She had always been a follower, a hanger-on. This was before she got married, when she was single and playing the field. She wanted to do so many things, music, art, writing, but she never had the courage to strike out and achieve something in her own right or through her own efforts. Something had happened recently, however, and she had found herself thinking about her past, a moment when someone had spoken badly to her. That was what she thought, anyway. Memory is a strange thing; she couldn’t even remember the words that had been used, not clearly. Perhaps it was merely a thought in her head. Things get conflated, especially when you try to remember them from a lifetime ago...

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To read the story, go to the Interlitq website.