Unhappiness
Title: Unhappiness
Author: Chalcedony
Notes: First line is from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Written in response to xfdrabble Challenge #5: First lines.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Mulder wondered at their unhappiness wordlessly--his father's weakness, his mother's perversity. The forced cheerfulness of routine and the drone of daily news covered their mutual guilty silence. Where was their sorrow at the lack and privation of her presence? Didn't they feel the gaping hole of loss, the quiet without her laughter, the blindness without her vision? After she was gone, their lives became fragmented from one another, lacking form and function, like pieces of a broken spaceship scattered across a lonely New Mexico Desert.
.