Magnum Opus

The insurance adjuster arrived early in the morning. In his profession it was better to work in the light of day. The old woman stood at the doorstep of her ruined home. The cold didn’t seem to bother her. Pulling his coat against himself, he went to greet her.

The house leaned towards a side like the carcass of a beached whale. Leftover wood and metal jutting up like fingers on a hand raised in prayer. The woman, an author, was elderly but by no means frail. Her husband, claimed by the fire, had been a government administrator.

They started walking through the wreckage. The woman started to tell him the story of her house. In doing so, she was reciting the ballad of her life.
The adjuster looked around, his gaze caressed the charred walls. Her words were putting him in a trance.

She told him about her early days, how her husband had courted her through college. A lifelong pragmatist but romantically a cynic. He tried to woo her by extolling the virtues of being an officer’s wife.

She had always wanted to live life unbound. Travelling the world, making youthful mistakes. But the government officer’s proposal was simply too practical for her father. She had married in the winter.

As they walked on, burnt debris crunching underfoot. The adjuster tried asking her about the exposed wiring. She stooped to pick up a rusted old bird cage. Telling him about the exotic specimens that her husband would import from foreign locales. She looked at the cage with a fierce intensity.

This got her talking about writing, her wifely duties never let her take the plunge. Never able to finish composing an entire book. She compromised by submitting little vignettes here and there. Short stories popping up in women’s magazines. An Essay published in a newspaper. This kept her spirit outwardly alive. Her characters went on adventures she never could.

They stopped at a blackened window frame. The wind whipping at their faces. Perhaps her writing was the little grain of independence that terrified her husband. She intoned with a sigh. In those days, it was believed that a woman had to be broken in, like a wild horse.

Her husband’s ferocity started with little acts of petulance. Saying that food tasted better when prepared without ink-stained fingers. Deriding her prose in front of his friends. She tried mollifying him by bearing his children. This merely pushed him further towards cruelty.

The first time he struck her, she had bought a typewriter from the winnings of a short story contest. It was a noisy metallic thing he said, it ruined the ambience. She was forced to store it in the attic, only using it when he was at work. On a cloudy afternoon, nursing a swollen lip, she had started working on her novel. There were tears in her eyes, from the prose or the pain, it was tough to say.

Over a quarter of a century, the book became her refuge. Every time her husband bloodied his fists against her face, her book grew thicker. Like the children she had nourished in her body, the book swelled up in the womb of her mind. Before the fire consumed her house, she had been close to finishing it.

They were back at the front door, the adjuster felt winded. His face had gone pale. He would need a warm cup of coffee on his way back. The woman looked at him with a serene sense of expectation. He told her that the paperwork would take a few days to complete, the fire looked accidental.

Wanting to desperately get away from the house but still succumbing to his curiosity. He asked the woman if any part of her book had survived the fire. She replied morosely that it was her life’s greatest work.

After the adjuster had driven away, the women sat amongst the rubble, ruminating on her future. She wouldn’t burden the children, the insurance money would be enough for travel.

Her daughter would pick her up and take her to the train station. Maybe she would drop by a bookstore and pick up a few novels. It had been a long time since she had read a thick book.

She remembered how difficult it became for her to write after her husband had retired. Being free from all obligations, she thought he would devote himself to her misery. But the years had taken the venom out of him. He had admitted defeat, resigned to a sullen life in the twilight of his years.
This led her to a startling realization. Without the specter of his abuse hanging over her, she couldn’t write. She had spent months wringing her hands in frustration, but the words refused to come.

An epiphany came to her one day when she served her husband his nightly medication. It would be easy to overdose him, he would sleep peacefully, till the very end. A prick from her knitting needle would cause the gas to ooze forth from the old leaky rubber pipes.

On the day it happened, She had spread the pages of her manuscript on their bed. Her husband lying next to them. This was the only way to finish her story. She had looked at them while lighting the matches, the pages, and the man. Her life’s greatest work. Her Magnum Opus.