AND THE TRUTH

SHALL SET YOU FREE

by

Gabrielle Ganelle

"Blue!" Mrs. Timothy said. "Can't you understand! I want green shutters, yes, but I want a little b-l-u-e in them." She spelled the word. "Just a hint of blue."

"Yup, ma'am," Biff said, "bluegreen.'

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Mrs. Timothy sat heavily into a garden chair. He accepted the gesture as an answer. "Women," he said, carving the word with sharp white lips. Then he rubbed two fingers, split in a V, down the sides of his oily nose a nose that struck out fiercely. Vibrissae grew out of the nostrils and hung stiffly like the legs of dead flies.

Mrs. Timothy turned from him and moved as though to look over her shoulder, for she dare not let him know her eyes smarted; dare not betray a lack of tolerance. Her heavy coastlines of lids over Mediterranean-blue eyes gave her the look of wise Asiatic mariners on uncharted seas.

She thought of their landlady, before she had married Arthur, when she still lived with Paula. She knew Arthur just casually then; courting was hardly the word for it, busy as he was, being assistant to the Reverend Mr. Curtis. Her landlady at that time was a Mrs. Deming who had a fossil face and whose only activity was in the eyes. Mrs. Timothy remembered how the women would sit for long hours watching the lives of their neighbors. Only her eyes would move; her body rigid with anticipation (very like a blind man). She was sure she knew all the evil of that street, having suspected she and Paula... Mrs. Timothy shuddered at the thought of that woman's untouched bosom, heaving, as it did, with moral indignation: an indignation invented even as her morality, which she needed to subdue the evil her prudish mind had conjured.

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