Fiction | July 16, 2014
The New Louise
Sharon Pomerantz
On the first morning her husband was away at a conference Upstate, Louise Lampert sat up in bed, strangely awake and aware. On summer mornings like this one, she generally rolled over and struggled back to sleep, finally rising, half in dread, by ten or eleven, but today the city beckoned, and the sun streamed optimistically across her peach area rug. Walking toward the bathroom, she noticed her feet: they were narrower than usual, and paler. No bunions or visible veins, and her toenails were the palest shell pink. Normally, when Louise bothered to paint her toenails, she picked bright scarlet to warm up the sallow undertones in her skin.
She had someone else’s polish on her feet.
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