This is a short story piece I just submitted for New River Anthology. It started out as a journal prompt for my creative writing class and just grew. Mrs. Bruce had us pick an object off of a desk and write the first thing that came to mind about the object. I picked stress balls, enjoy!
Moment of Passion
Seaonna stood in front of the fire place, mesmerized by each flare of brilliant crimson red and sunset orange that licked the cindering firewood wildly. It crackled, sizzled and popped with each new lick of the flames. In her left hand she held two metal stress balls that were silver and polished to perfection. The pair weighed half a pound each and measuring 1.7 inches in diameter. To her they felt as if all the weight and problems of her prestige world were packed in those tiny metallic globes. They were cold as ice to the touch, sending cool electric shocks through her hand and up her arm. She turned them around in circles letting each orbit the other as if they were the earth and the moon. As she twirled them in the palm of her hand, the contact of metal on metal produced a melody of chimes. During the moments that she could stop turning the pygmy spheres, she would look down into the palm of her hand and stare into their surfaces. The shiny surfaces of the orbs cast a face, the reflection of a woman she did not recognize. The face of a stranger stared back at her; a sorrowful, very pissed off stranger.
In a fit of frustration, hatred and rage, Seaonna threw the relaxation tools across the room. The sound of smashing glass echoed through her expensively decorated mansion library. Shards of glass hit the hardwood floors, scattering and sliding across the floor as if they were smooth rocks bouncing across water. She stood with her head held high and proper posture as she admired her release. Hanging, now crooked, on the wall was a seven foot by five foot picture of her husband. It was taken on the first day he entered office as governor of North Carolina. Ah now that’s what I call REAL stress relief! She thought to herself. The stress balls were a gift from her husband. It was as if he said, “Here, your really going to need these because I am about to give you a cause to use them.”
With elections underway Connor was constantly under a microscope; not only by the media but by his running opponents. So, the last thing she expected was for the brilliant moron to get himself caught in the middle of a scandal. It wasn’t a tasteful scandal either. No, he had to get himself into a cliché cheating scandal, this close to re-elections. Connor was the smartest man she had ever met but he had no common since when it came to uncomplicated matters such as the trouble he had himself in now. On top of finding out about the affair straight from his mistress’s mouth, the whore wanted to go public. That’s not just a name that came to mind when Seaoona thought of the 19 year old, that just minutes ago came to her with intentions of blackmail to shut her up. She was a real whore of the night that walked the streets of downtown Raleigh. Seaonna made a mental note to call her doctor in the morning to have a check up and some test, to make sure her husband hadn’t bought anything home from his escapades of rolling around in the trash. The harlot threatened to go public about the affair, giving Seaonna the ultimatum of paying a ransom; that by most standards would be considered rape. If they failed to do so within a few hours, she was going to the paparazzi. The uneducated bimbo, who called herself Savanna, stated that she would make millions from the press. She also wanted to give the father of her unborn child, a chance to pay his child support up front. Common since did not prevail in this case either. Connor had conviently forgotten to use any sort of protection why he was robbing the trailer park cradle.
This was Seaonna’s life and the man she had married. She did not love him, not the way she was suppose to, not as a wife should love and cherish her husband. She knew she should be inconsolable with her husband’s treacherous act, but the act its self is not what made her tremble with blinding rage at the moment. She could care less about his extra circular affairs. Hell, she encouraged them as long as they were at the appropriate times, and election time was not one of them. If he was off diddling whatever he gets his hands on, that meant that he wasn’t begging her for a roll in-between the sheets. The less she had to satisfy him the better; she married him for the money and prestige of being a governor’s and one day, the president of the United States of America’s wife. The power was also a nice extra to go along with the package. Sex, was the last on the list of reasons she ever agreed to marry Connor Sullivan.
Turning back to the fire place, Seaonna let her mind dance along with the flames. She envied their joyful dance and the simplicity of the job it had to do. I wish my life and its solutions were as easy as yours my torrid. If only my job was to burn, destroy and consume; leaving no evidence behind. That would be a life I could easily fall into, comfortably. For now she had to fall into the life that she fought to keep and won. She had to cover up his stupid act before it ruined not only his career but her comfortable and oh so fabulous lifestyle. She turned away from the luminous blaze and walked to where the stress balls laid on the floor surrounded by the fragments of broken glass and blood. She bent down, avoiding the glass and blood and picked them up. Massaging the cool metal once more in the palm of her hands, she stared down at the lifeless Savanna and began to hatch her recovery scheme.
