Fabrizio Ulivieri - Content Creator

  Summer. The cottage beside the big house. A place offered, accepted. No more to say. He arrives. Puts his bag down. Takes out a cigar. Does not light it. Stands at the window. Clouds crossing the moon. A scene he has seen before, yet he watches as if it might tell him something. A sound behind him. Barbara. Back already. Four minutes since he left her. Now here she is again. Face discoloured.  Lips tight, working at the corners. Something held in. She looks at him. Ten seconds, maybe more.  Long enough for him to feel the question rising: What does she see? What does she think she sees? He feels the old urge to speak first. To explain. To defend.  Defend what? He does not know.  Perhaps himself. Perhaps the idea of himself. She speaks before he can. “I will never forgive you for this.”

  That was what he had become. Her creation - one might even say, her invention. He had become flesh of her flesh, and she kept and supported him because she had become him by annihilating him. And it had all begun with an inexhaustible love for him, a love concealed in her heart amid a constant desire to possess him completely. To be his goddess. To hold him in her hands. She had finally reshaped him into a new man. She had been the first to believe in her own power to create men as she wished. Inventions. She exacted a great deal from him - slavishness, submission.