1

“You’re taking the dog?”

He steps past me as though I haven’t spoken but condescends to answer at the last moment.

“She’s mine,” he shrugs, “you never liked her anyway.”

“Even the dog?” My voice rises despite my penultimate effort to remain calm.

“I left you the couch.”

“You left me half the couch,” I snort, “the half we never sit on.”

“You’ll be sitting on it now,” he says as he turns to leave, calling Candy over his shoulder.

She gives me a quick backward glance as she trots down the pathway and jumps onto the back of his truck. James doesn’t even give me that.

Despite the dismal weather, I remain outside watching as he reverses down the driveway and drives off down the street. The truck’s red tail lights blend in with the garish red, green and white Christmas lights sparkling crazily up and down the street as they disappear around the corner.

“Well, there goes thirty years of marriage,” I whisper, tucking a stray, greying curl behind my ear. “You’re welcome.”

I turn to go inside but pause as I put my hand on the doorknob. I’ve always hated this knob. The door, a salvage yard find from about twenty years ago when we built the house, had come with a really pretty ceramic knob with pink and gold flowers around the rim. But James hadn’t liked it and had replaced it with a more generic brass one.

“Story of my frigging life,” I sigh.

Or his life. After all, he’s the one who replaced his wife, the mother of his children, with his much younger, high school diploma, secretary.

‘How cliché.’

Only it doesn’t feel cliché. It feels like I’m an old Christmas bauble handed down through the generations that’s showing a few dents, and has perhaps lost its shine, and I’ve been replaced with a bright, golden plastic one that’ll last five minutes.

I study the dark outside of the house silently. There are no Christmas lights for us this year. James was usually the one who went up the ladder and hung them. And no Christmas tree, because he didn’t go and buy one. Unless he did, for his new house, but I don’t want to think about that. And I haven’t baked gingerbread, or white Christmas, or rum balls, or hung up a Christmas cake, or trawled through the garage to find last year’s decorations, or painted my annual family bauble.

No, there’s no Christmas cheer here this year. Even the kids, all in different states, are doing their own thing with their partners and families, travel and the like. We haven’t told them about the separation yet. I don’t want to ruin their festive season.

“This will be my first Christmas alone in thirty years,” I whisper, turning to walk inside. “Completely alone.”

Normally I like my own company, prefer it actually. But this is different.

As I enter the house my eye catches the axe James had left leaning against the inside of the door. He’d come back after work today to get a few final things. His tools, some furniture his new girlfriend must have sent him back to retrieve, CDs, and the dog. But I guess he’d felt the awkwardness as much as I did with his quick-fire scavenger hunt around what had once been our family home, because he’d forgotten his axe.

Sighing, I reach down and heft it.

Raising it over my shoulder I step towards the door and narrow my eyes at the knob. I could try removing it with a screwdriver, I guess. But smashing it seems to be exactly what I need to do right now. And it’s my house; we’d agreed he’d get the lake cottage and I’d stay here where my backyard studio is, and my beloved garden. Although the divorce isn’t finalised I’m sure he’ll stick to his word on this, at least. Neither of us wants to make our split any messier than it already is.

The only problem is that this house holds so many memories. Everywhere I look, I see him. And lately the memories these walls hold are awful; it’s as though the past twelve months of marital disintegration had wiped out the happy twenty-nine years that came before.

If I’m going to stay here I need to make it my house — and make new memories. Starting now.

Raising the axe over my shoulder I set about my systematic doorknob destruction. One after the other I rain down blows upon the offending piece of door hardware. Each blow covers my cries of rage and despair, bottled up through the past few months of accusations, denials, proofs, muttered confessions, arguments and removalists.

When I’m finished my face is wet with tears, but the handle is off. The door’s a little worse for wear too, actually a lot worse for wear, but I feel much better.

“Well,” I sigh, speaking out loud as though Candy is still here to listen. James was lying to justify his actions, as usual, when he took her tonight. He knows full well I loved that dog. “I guess I’ll have to push a chair up against the door tonight and just hope no one breaks in. I can’t do anything about the gaping hole.”

No sooner have the words left my mouth than I squeak and spin to face my living room as a thunderous crash rocks the whole house.

Falling back against the wall, one hand still clutching the axe, the other my heart, I cough and gasp as a dense cloud of plaster dust, woodchips, and something else clouds the room and swirls all around me, sticking to my wet cheeks.

As the air clears I stare in shock at what was once my sparse but tidy living room, and up at the huge hole in my ceiling, the stars now visible. Looking back down at the colossal mess surrounding me, I realise what it is that’s swirling all around me.

Feathers.

“That must have been one fucking big bird,” I whisper.