Opening lines of KMKaung's 53 Red Roses--A short story--

Opening lines of my novella 53 Red Roses.

53 Red Roses was first published in The Northern Virginia Review, of the Northern VA Community College.

It was one of my 3 stories and one painting published there over three years, and one year I won the Best in Show award.

--

Donna Lee Woods pushed her brown hair off her face and sighed. 
Her mirror had always told her she was plain. 
It was Valentine’s Day and her fifty third birthday combined, and she was sure as usual her husband Bob would forget both. 
He was getting very absent minded, especially with the short term memory, and she was hardly any better. 

After twenty eight years of marriage, they had grown used to each other. 
She had given up a lot, including a career as a linguist and her great love of travel and languages, because Bob just said once, “I’d like to see you when I come home from work in the evenings.” 
This was when she was taking French courses at the Alliance Française in Rangoon, where Bob had been posted with the American Embassy in the late fifties. 
She tagged along where her husband was posted, but they weren’t the places she would have gone if she were going alone. 
Alone, she might have chosen to walk across Afghanistan and Inner Mongolia in the 15th century emperor Babur’s footsteps, or gone to Angkor Wat in Cambodia and started researching Khmer Rouge survivor stories, but she was just an embassy wife, following where her spouse was posted. 
Most of the time she hated it. 

Copyright KMKaung