Free The Life Before Her Eyes by Laura Kasischke

such a note?
    She looked at the handwriting again, but the more she looked, the less familiar it became. Finally she crumpled it all back up and again tossed it in the trash can in the garage, closing the lid tightly, walking away from it, still smiling.
    It was certainly not worth worrying about.
    Some crazy student of Paul's. Some student of her own from the community college, someone she'd failed for poor attendance, or someone who remembered her from high school—some old boyfriend she'd dumped.
    She was forty years old. She'd lived in Briar Hill her whole life. The number of people she'd hurt or rejected, the number of times she'd said something cruel (though never intentionally—could she ever remember a time she'd
intentionally
hurt another person?) was unfathomable by now. It made her dizzy and sick to think of it, like looking into an abyss full of stink and flies. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened. Some inexplicable message intended to—what? Unnerve her? Disarm her?
    She wouldn't let it.
    Life was short.
    Her life was perfect.
    And it was
hers.

Peonies and Lilac
    A LWAYS WITH E MMA OFF AT SCHOOL, THE HOUSE SEEMED empty to Diana—though not unpleasantly so.
    All the life that had taken place in it only an hour before—the toast, the coffee, the scrambled eggs, the pajamas tossed on the bedroom floor—all that life had accumulated a silence that seemed made of whatever dusty particles thought and memory sent out of the mind in the process of passing.
    Nothing had happened there in the brief time between Diana's leaving with Emma and returning without her, and nothing would change now until Diana chose to change it.
    The house was a still life....
    A still life you could walk into and observe with all of your senses, the stationary images of your things, the silence and the material that made up your life.
    Paul's spoon lying where he had left it beside his bowl of Grape-Nuts.
    Emma's Pooh cup half full of Sunny Delight.
    Diana stopped at that image and took a sip from the cup. The strange breakfast beverage in it—what was it made of, the juice of some hallucinated fruit?—tasted oddly cold, and the frozen sweetness of it opened a bright eye of pain at Diana's temple, and the pain of it placed her securely back into her body. She poured what was left of the juice into the sink and put the cup upside down in the empty dishwasher, then opened the back door and looked out into the yard.
    A damp violet fog poured in through the screen door, filtered into a million little microscopic squares. But there was heat in the breeze. The sun was rising higher in the sky, and it was burning away the cool storm of the night before.
    Diana stood very still, trying to remember something ... Who?...What?
    There was something (someone?) standing just outside of the reach of her thoughts, someone she needed to recall, who had been brought in on the warmed breeze but then been turned to molecules passing through the back door's screen. It was something that bothered her, some detail that was out of place in her dream-perfect life, something that, if she could reach it with her recollection, she might be able to return to its right place.
    Miss Zena?
    Miss Zena.
    It must have been the peonies in their crisp tutus, just bloomed, that had reminded her—the ribbons and lace, the girly purity of it. Then, a little black cloud passing over the prettiness of her backyard. Diana never thought of ballet, of her pink satin toe shoes, without feeling shame.
    For years she'd taken ballet lessons at Miss Zena's School of Dance, a studio owned by a French woman in a strip mall outside of town, and she'd loved it ... loved the French woman, who was all grace and bones, loved ballet ... but then she'd quit taking the lessons after ninth grade, after she'd gotten caught smoking marijuana with six or seven other ballerinas in the dressing room just before they were to go onstage for their end-of-the-year recital.
    They