Entries Tagged 'Short Fiction' ↓

You are flipping through stacks of pictures while he plays chess on the computer. There are photographs of his old band in the studio, his ugly bowtie and cumberbund combo from senior prom and him with that awful, grown-out haircut sitting on some rotting log.

The pictures stick together, tacky with time and dirt and tape. Fuzzy photos of him as a baby in a big, red wagon. Pictures of hollowed out grocery stores, black and white images of sculptures and lampshades.

He joins you on his bed, bending it with his weight, as you are nearing the end of the pile. He twists a lock of your hair, looking at them with you, and you love him so much you wish you could have loved him at eight and twelve and twenty-two.

An out-of-focus shot of a sunshine-filled window rests between smiling faces from a toddler’s birthday party. His bed, the one your are resting on right now, is in the foreground, just a large smudge in the belly of the window’s light. Woven into the wrought-iron bars is the sash of his bathrobe. The one you see hanging ont he back of his bedroom door.

Your guts stop churning.
Your pulse drives wildly into the base of your skull.

“Who did you tie up?,” you manage to mutter, dizzy, hoping he’ll say he staged it all. Merely a scene for a snapshot.

He sighs as he says it, pitying you. “Marcy.”

All you can think about is how Marcy, his ex, considered herself a brilliant chess player.

And how he will never tie you up again.

(Thanks be to Torrez, who saved this story from near extinction.)

At the light, in the soupy early evening haze of the last day of September, you stare straight ahead while speaking at her. She sits stoicly, blinking evenly in the passenger’s seat, her hands out of sight, her lips slick wet. You push together words you form on spot, without thought, and she rolls her eyes in time with her tongue. At you.

Your lazy jokes don’t change what you said. You speak with authority and abandon, unaware of the weight you toss about with your throat. She finds you detestable, with your pea-stink denim jacket and your too-long, natty red hair.

She finds a swingset in her peripheral and focuses hard. The swings are dusty and bare, and she wonders when it got too cold. She stopped wearing any jewlery over a year ago, you said it hid her shine, and she wishes desperately for a ring or a bracelet to fondle. Instead of that zipper of your stiff, old hoodie.

You think about yesterday. And how it was pretty much the same. You think about the first time, how you hurt her, and how on that day you sort of made her.

She sits beside you, not struggling, not screaming, not feeling. Just silently, finally, deciding to go.

And you stare, still, straight ahead.