Baby Shoes

My son-in-law walks out soon after the baby is born.

That's the whole story in ten words. It has a beginning and middle. Nobody knows how it will end.

The narrative lacks elegance, though I am grateful his mother bought baby shoes for the older child soon after it happened. There wasn't much money left in the pot after he left.

There is controlled cliché in this story.

There is conflict.

We await resolution.

I could show rather than tell who did what, paint a picture of recrimination in dialogue and verse, study the Rashomon effect through contradictory points of view. I could mix short sentences with long. But it's a lifetime of uncertainty for small voices caught in the shrapnel of cross words and anger.

I could arrange the lines as a sonnet with derivative rhyme; add the rhythm of a broken heart. I could tell you the story in villanelle or pantun. In haiku or tanka.

I could appeal to your senses, so you too can taste the bitterness of tears, and smell the gun smoke of betrayal. I could let you hear the derision with which he tells my daughter it is all her fault.

I could let you sense the weight of a two-year-old, the pull on Caesarian scars as my daughter lifts the older child in and out of her cot. I could articulate the wail of the newborn crying for her rapidly drying milk supply.

At the peak of the story arc, the turning point is the discovery of the long-denied affair.

Please forgive my authorial intrusion.

I leave room for a reader's response.