Blood and Bone: A Smattering of Unease by Shannon Rae Noble Page B

he came home from work. She was often sweaty and disheveled, dinner either still cooking or burned, the kitchen a mess, when he walked through the door.
    Eventually, Juniper managed to coordinate everything and became efficient at her work. She completed the chores with time to spare, and used that extra `time for herself. She read books, watched television, or relaxed on the rear patio with a drink, observing the comings and goings of the wildlife in the woods and fields that surrounded the house. Simon came home every evening to a hot, perfectly prepared dinner awaiting him on the polished and elegantly set dining room table.
    After a few days of being greeted coolly at the door, Simon questioned how his pretty young wife was spending her days. At the time, she was unaware that he wanted her to be flustered, frazzled, and exhausted, running around the house in a panic, trying to get things done by the time he arrived.
    He had not been pleased at Juniper’s explanation of efficiency. The reprimand, as usual, was physically harsh, and he doubled her list of chores, practically pushing her out of bed the next morning to start work despite her freshly bruised ribs.
    He shook his finger at her. “Don’t ever let me catch you sitting around reading worthless smutty romance novels or watching television,” he said. “I didn’t marry you to use up my electricity watching Jerry Springer and those other idiotic reality shows all day long.”
    His newly wedded wife didn’t bother to argue that she watched the History and Discovery channels, not reality television. Nor did she correct him and tell him that she read books from his own library; it really would have hit the fan, then. She had learned enough of his obsessive-compulsive habits to make sure each book looked untouched when she returned it to its shelf each day.
    She had learned enough to remain silent about why she thought he had married her, to begin with: she had thought he’d loved her. He had been good to her when they met. A gentleman. Well-mannered. Generous. Attentive. Affectionate.
    But as soon as they had crossed the threshold of his home, the crash course in Simon Kurst’s marriage practices had begun. She was, for all intents and purposes, his servant. His possession. To use as he saw fit.
    The honeymoon, as they say, was over.
    Juniper learned many things early on in her marriage, such as how not to speak unless spoken to; how not to argue; how to correctly clean the house, wash the clothes and dishes, dust the furniture. Everything had to be done exactly to Simon’s specifications; and the smallest details were subjected to Simon’s meticulous daily inspection – down to the measuring and marking of the liquid laundry detergent bottle.
    The one thing she didn’t worry about were the already opened wine bottles; the glass was too dark for Simon to see the levels of the liquid inside, so he didn’t mark them. He marked the vodka, the scotch, and the rum bottles. Juniper didn’t like any of those, so she never had to worry about replacing the contents of any of them.
    One of her lessons was that even though Simon expected perfection of Juniper, he was suspicious when he received it. What she learned from this were which trace items to leave undone: enough to allay his suspicions, but not enough to earn extreme punishment.
    Two years later, however, nothing had changed – except for Juniper. Finding herself repeatedly on the receiving end of Simon’s unpredictable and inescapable rage, she had become increasingly rebellious, though she didn’t show it. Where once she had been soft and loving, she had become hard and indifferent. She was just waiting.
    Now, as she opened the sideboard drawer and prepared to polish the silver, she heard the familiar drone of the mail truck, which drove by every day at quarter past eleven. It never stopped there. All of the mail went to Simon’s office or to his post office box.
    When the sound of the truck’s motor