Regina Saxony

“Sweetheart, could you bring me my book off of the kitchen counter?” Ilya croaks, wincing as he sits up in bed.

“Hold on one second!” Regina bites, wrapping her sandwich in thick, brown parchment paper, placing it in her bag very carefully as to prevent it from squishing and ruining everything. Dishes lay dirty in the basin, empty glass bottles lining the kitchen counter, everything was something of a wreck and she wasn’t even dressed for work.

Meekly she moves to the next step of preparing herself, skipping over to the wardrobe and dresser nestled tightly in the corner not as eloquently as she had envisioned. “Regina… My book?” He fumes.

Combing snags out with her fingers to soften the pain, she then hastily runs the brush through the nappy mane. “One minute, Ilya!” She retorts, gritting her teeth together as her face contorts into a writhing, wrinkly mess from the amount of force she applies to allow for the brush to run it’s course down her hair.

Ilya taps his finger on his knee. “You don’t have to look at yourself to effectively brush your hair.”

“And you don’t have to be an ass to effectively get what you want,” Regina quirks, ultimately giving up on her hair and redirecting her attention to ensnaring the mess to contain it to an acceptable fashion.

“You’re going to work in a bread factory full of babushkas. You don’t need to look pretty.” Ilya fiddles with the quilt between his fingers. Rummaging through the wardrobe with clumsy touches, Regina withdraws a work dress that was freshly ironed from the day before as she ignores Ilya’s impatient rudeness. Canvases stacked against the wall teeter as she slams the wardrobe shut.

“No. No. No…” She whispers, two fingers pinching the skewed bridge of her nose as her artwork clambers to the floor. The word ‘fuck’ dangles on her bitten lips.

Ilya says it for her, “Fuck!” He exclaims, rubbing his temples, “Holy fuck, could you watch what you’re doing!”

“It’s not your artwork that just got smashed!” She hollers, crouching to her knees as she throws the dress aside. Tears well in her eyes as the swirled painting has a slash through the upper left to the right corners. The waste causes her heart to beat slowly, that kind of devastating slowness that threatens death and hurts with each rhythmic pulse.

Shaking her head, she remembers that there is a job she needed to be timely to and she rises to her feet. In order to keep a modesty about their relationship, she would change behind open kitchen cabinets in a forged discreetness. As Ilya was only a man as she was a woman, she could feel his stares on her bare skin.

In spitefulness, his face red like poppies in the market, he brashly suggests, “For the love of Christ, just change in front of me, Regina.”

“Ilya…” She scolds. Her arms folded around her stiff chest, unwilling to bow the slightest bit under his persistence.

“Goddamnit! Regina, just get dressed.”

Violently, she decides that he isn’t going to understand her and that he is hurting on the inside. She stands before him and changes with her jaw clenched tightly, throwing the clothes she discards in a storm of anger, not caring that his eyes watch her in this squinted misery. Mechanically, in a choppy series of motions, she dresses. Conforming into a gray dress and sliding on gray shoes, she walks calmly over to the table. The hardcover lies there and she just blankly stares at it.

It comes into her clutches and leaves them as soon as her fingers grace the leather. “There’s your damned book!” she means to say it hatefully, but says it like a scurrying school girl as she sprints towards the door and down the flights of stairs. Unsure and extremely ashamed, she rushes to work, the snow hindering her further as she gallops down the icy streets.

Her ribbons trail behind her in her rapidness, she didn’t have time to stop and admire the black, wilted, and utterly dead rose bush that had amassed to nothing but a bundle of lifeless, black thorns.