Perfume

She was present in Laura’s nightmares, though Laura could never bring herself to admit this. Laura would stand at her mother’s side and welcome her with all the ardour which existed within her body, within her bones, but it would never be enough. Her mother was the very personification of misery, though Laura liked to laugh and reply that her mother’s goodness was alive, though it might well have been invisible to animals without an innate ability to smell blood. I’d look at her beautiful eyes, deep pools of azure framed by limp blonde hair which swayed neatly about her shoulders, and tell her that some people were simply born incapable of love. I could see how she would try to understand, but instead her smile would steal strikingly across her face and break my heart into pieces. Her mother had never treated her with the same love which she was willing to pour from her heart; and she did so very willingly, perhaps in an attempt to fill the great vast in-between the desirable reciprocating of love and the realistic severance of any form of affection, with something much more exquisite. Perhaps this was why I despised this woman so, and as I held her daughter’s frail and beautiful form against my own, the thought of her mother’s contemptibility caused my stomach to spasm in incredulity. How something so hideous had created such a delicate frame was implausible, and my mind shook with mordantly unsolicited  prayers of unqualified thanks.