The Faraway Bride by Stella Benson — Read

From the moment of Seryozha's departure from Chi-tao-kou, Anna's world seemed filled with an entirely new air. One would have said that Seryozha must have filled the house as completely as a snail fills its shell -- so convoluted, so entire was the emptiness he left, from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall. Out of doors, looking through Anna's eyes, one would have guessed her son a bright obscuring light -- so bleakly new and hard and shadowless was every leaf, every hill, every silly angle of the street, lacking even the possibility of his presence. It was a world lit, as it were, by indirect lighting under low clouds, instead of by the honest bland sun.

Anna's son, ever since his birth, had always been within a few miles of her, and now those few miles, empty of him -- a cube of featureless summer air -- boxed her in, a prisoner. She could not spontaneously imagine his return. With a mental effort she could invent elaborate scenes of his homecoming, but she knew them to be artificial, knew them to be constructed with ingenuity rather than with faith and hope. Such scenes were always shattered by her conviction of premonition. "Absurd! . He will never come back. " Every inch of the earth is, after all, so dangerous. Here, where we stand, a minute or a million years ago, some heart failed. There, at that point to which our dear love is hurrying, the lightning struck, the germ of plague was born, the tree will fall, the flood will surge, the murderer will stab -- a minute or a million years hence -- a minute or a million years ago. Living is a matter of missing death by a hair's-breadth or an aeon -- it doesn't matter which -- and dying is a matter of coincidence. If we knew the past and the future of every yard of every path we tread, or of every stone our dear love's foot turns over as he goes, where should we turn for peace? Once we have realized the billions of deaths and horrors that have been, the billions that will be, every inch of the world seems soaked in blood. Every inch of the world, it seemed to Anna, was haunted by the ghost of a son whose mother had let him go. "Even at this very second, perhaps, his foot is lifted for his last stride."