She walked down the aisle, unblinking, the bristles of her rotted broom streaking lines in the grime-laden path. The church had been in her care for decades now, but as the years passed she seemed to lose interest in its maintenance. The fifty-something-year-old woman went through the motions of barely sweeping the dust out of her way as she took her rounds of the once-populated church. Her eyes drifted to a singular floorboard, the only one that hadn’t turned a mouldy grey colour; it was rather a sooty shade. It creaked as she trudged past it.
 
She seated herself in the pew furthest from the altar, remembering how she would creep out the back during Mass to visit her then-boyfriend. She was 19, he was older. That was before they got married, before she distanced herself from her family. Before he started beating her. She remembers how she would beg and plead for him to relent. He never listened.
 
He once loved her. Hopefully. Otherwise, it would have all been for nothing. She only endured him for as long as she did because she hoped some part of him still held some form of affection for her. Unlikely. Whatever love she had for him died with him twenty years ago. They never recovered his body, but she knew he was dead. He would never surrender his power over her if he hadn’t been physically forced to.
 
She still remembers how he screamed for her to obey him, how he drunkenly tore their home apart. How he lashed at her till her skin was raw, red. She remembers how she destroyed the key to the rusted padlock on the trapdoor by the fifth pew on the left. How he begged and pleaded for food, for water. For air.