Gemotions

The newspaper lay open on the worn wooden table, the article highlighted in garish yellow marker. “Brenda’s Triumph Over Adversity.” Brenda choked on her coffee. The writer, bless her heart, had clearly never seen Brenda’s actual “adversities.”

She felt a slow burn behind her eyes. The house felt too small, the air thick with unspoken resentment. Every carefully crafted sentence, every uplifting anecdote, was a grotesque misrepresentation of reality.

She pushed back her chair with a sharp scrape. The silence in the room screamed the falseness of it all. Triumph? She wanted to scream with laughter at the preposterousness of the word. She walked to the window, staring at the grey sky, and contemplated burning it all down.