Fiction.

Sabrina

Charlie breaks the news, and I can’t say I’m surprised. We’d all seen it coming, and it was only a matter of when. Every time before this we held our breaths and prayed, for her sake, that she’d succeed. But something always got in the way.

Last time it was her ex-roommate, who was inexplicably “in the neighborhood” after moving seventy blocks uptown, and suddenly remembered an old book in the apartment. Sabrina always said she shouldn’t have let her walk away with the extra set of keys. Catie filled the cramped building with her signature theater major scream when she nudged open the bathroom door and saw the hazy red pool in the bathtub. Sabrina was real upset about that one, probably more than any of her failed attempts before it.

She adored the idea of it being theatrical, a visual treat, wanted her suicide to be such a perfect moment frozen in time as to warrant immortality in a painting. Her favorite photo was that of the Most Beautiful Suicide, the broken body of the still elegant Evelyn McHale splayed over the dented hood of the car her biggest inspiration. That, and, though it was cliché, Sylvia Plath. Sabrina couldn’t justify the head in oven thing, though. Too messy, too much of a signature for someone else. Besides, it wouldn’t show off her best features, wouldn’t present the right image.

Sabrina was pale, with a dead glazed glow that haunted her like a shy halo. She dyed her near white blond hair a near wine red, and painted her lips the same color, always with the pad of her right index finger and never the tip of the lipstick. She was fond of collecting funeral clothes, her favorite procession a Victorian mourning ruffled collar, in a near transparent black gauze that she wore over exposed tank tops in the winter as if it was any normal scarf. There was a penny sized stain with uneven edges and a faint copper tint on one of the topmost layers that she happily pointed out to anyone who paid heed to her morbid accessory, proposing extravagant and elaborate hypothesis of its origin and meaning. Charlie had suggested that she try a stain remover on it once, and Sabrina had nearly killed him with her shocked exclamations. He never mentioned it again.

A few months ago she tried her hand at taxidermy and to no one’s surprise, was simply no good at it. Sure, she could rip out the still wet, warm slushy organs of birds and squirrels without a flinch, but when it came to the intricate careful arrangement and polishing of outer skin and fragile bones, she simply lacked the patience.

She liked making grand plans for the idea of them and then rushed the actual act, always. Once she insisted that Charlie and I accompany her in a burglary Godard would have appreciated. She wore smart black gloves and a black pencil dress that molded to every bone of her thin frame. Charlie wore a crisp white shirt and black pants and polished shoes, and she assigned me a shirt with a peter pan collar to play the innocent lolita to offset her role as the vixen.

We were going to break into the Park Avenue loft of her stepfather, who’d given her the security code and, she assumed, soon forgot that he did. We hoped that his new mistress would not be home—she hoped otherwise. When Charlie dared to ask why, she punctuated her tiny waist with the edges of her gloved fists. He shut up. We didn’t’ know what we were going to do when we got there, didn’t know what she planned to pull off.

But Sabrina was always so awfully persuasive. We got inside the apartment and found it empty, though the sunlight that slapped us from every giant window made us terrified. She didn’t hesitate in her walk to his bedroom, where she pulled out his drawer of condoms and lube and expensive anal beads and cock rings and vibrators with glossy pearled ends and tossed everything in her oversized tote. We’re done, she said, and slammed the door. We never heard the rest of the story, if her stepfather found out it was her, if he could have, would have even confronted it.

Anyway. Charlie tells me the news and after we sit there for a few minutes and say things like I’m glad she finally did it and he shows me the Polaroid he took when he found her—just like she requested—looking more beautiful than ever with her red hair perfectly framing her face, her rolled up eyes and black slip and dangling feet, he starts crying but doesn’t make any sound. I watch him but I don’t feel like crying, just this sort of relief. I’m happy for her, I am.

I could have never had her when she lived. Charlie couldn’t either, though he got close, with their nights spent in cold parks and rooftops and dressing rooms and bedroom floors while she gave him her cold, pale body. But she had wanted me to have the photo.

That’s all that matters, I tell myself, as my hand holding the print, the last and most of her trembles, and it looks like her soft hair and lashes tremble with it.

(unpolished, of course. Inspired by Alma, for a creative writing class.)

#fiction #short story #writing
/39 notes /11:55 PM

Color

She layers on cherry red lipstick, as she always does for Mickey. Mickey prefers animal print bras with slightly prickly textures that he caresses with his index finger and thumb, black lace thongs that irritates the insides of her thigh. Today he opens the door and doesn’t smile, even though she’s wearing his favorite leopard print coat over her lingerie. “Hi,” she says, and he starts to loosen his tie.

Mickey likes the sight of her red lips smudged all over him, the crayon like stains he gets on the inside of his shirts afterwards. Neale doesn’t like make up, except for nude glossed lips and a pinch of freshly slapped pink in her cheeks. For Neale, she wears slightly loose tshirts without a bra and little black gym shorts that clutch the soft parenthesis of her thighs like flower petals.

Neale admires her with her clothes on, first, touching a trembling hand to the bub of her rosy nipple beneath the thin fabric of the shirt. He fucks her from behind with the shorts still nestled between her ankles, pressing the bottom of his palm down, hard, on the space between her shoulder blades as he shoves deeper and harder.

Eric’s favorite is her electric blue latex corset with her five inch platform white stripper boots. She carries the shoes in a separate bag and clutch the sides of her coat close in the cab so that the driver can’t see the reflections beneath.

Tim likes shoes, pointy toed, pinkies rubbed, blisters bursting against patent leather red stilettos. He presses his cheeks to the soft fold of his carpet and clutches her ankles as if they’re shrines and kisses the tip of her shoe, leaving a faint white circle that fades when he lifts his face away from the impeccable red gloss. Sometimes she fakes sighs and moans.

When she’s not working she wears yellow boyshorts printed with tiny blue daisies and loose tank tops that reveal the top few notches of her ribs. Or she wears sundresses around her room, one of those light, cotton shifts from the 90’s her roommate ridicules. She makes waffles or pancakes and adds on too much whipped cream. She digs in the fluff with a finger and sucks it off, thinking about how many of her clients would appreciate watching that and smiling. When it’s not too cold she goes to the rooftop with a warm throw and a hot cup of cider spiked with whiskey and watches Manhattan.

Some days she takes her drawing pad and her old case of colored pencils. She draws Mickey and Eric and Neale and Tim in all their brilliant colors, colors they don’t know they have and won’t recognize, if she saw. Her coworkers forget a man and his name the day after. But that’s why she gets regulars and they don’t, though she has to remember them by their shapes and shades.

At the bar the man with the scruffy chestnut hair and the faintest stubble on his perfect chin asks her, in a charming British accent, what she does. She presses her lips (today, Delicieuse by Chanel, a somewhat flashy, tinted burgundy) to the cocktail glass and answers, “I’m an artist.”

He says he’d like to see her art and she says, “Okay. But your place.”

He acts surprised, I meant it, he says. I want to know more about you.

“Okay,” she says again, meeting his eye. “Your place.”

In the morning she can’t find her black thong but that’s okay, she has plenty more. She reapplies her lipstick and kisses him on the forehead, leaving a faded coral miniature map of her lips. He stirs, but she slips away before he wakes.

***

At home she writes an email to the man she’s in love with.

Jack, she writes, I hope the next call I get from a restricted number will be your voice. I hope we’ll meet in front of the Maritime and you’ll look at me with those dear, gray eyes and repeat the instructions you gave me the first time. I hope you’ll press me against the windows for the city to watch and grip the roots of my hair (it’s still blonde, like you wanted) and after, instead of the crisp green of stacked bills you’ll hand me a boarding pass to the city with that name I can’t pronounce.

She presses send and doesn’t need to glance up to know what her next email will read: delivery permanently failed.

(Another exercise for my CW class. I’m very unsure about the ending and am considering cutting it off at the asterisk. Your thoughts? )

#fiction #short story #creative writing
/80 notes /06:46 PM

Ana

Fitting rooms. That’s where I go, Ana said. She stared at the ashes on the end of her cigarette, tiny Christmas lights pushed out the passenger window, a thin golden wrist dangling down and drifting smoke into the night sky.

And not even the nice ones, but those trendy stores with the loud loud music and the long lines. All the girls text and sigh and tap their feet. All the salesgirl are impatient and cheap. The buttons fall within a week. The floors are dirty and the lighting is always too bright or too dim.

But the best part is seeing myself. When I slip out of my clothes and there I am, half naked, on a finger print smudged mirror, or three. The best is when I notice my ribs first. Not just faint outlines but a skeleton on display. If I’m feeling really good I’ll trace my fingers down my shoulders and rest at the ruffled edge of my bra, pressing into the indents of my waist. Sometimes I hold them to my hipbones, gripping them like if someone was trying to snatch me away.

The outfits don’t really matter. It’s just seeing myself as someone different, you know. And plus fitting room mirrors always make me look skinnier. Maybe it’s because I’m not on a scale at the same time. In fitting rooms I don’t look so disgusting.

Oh Ana, I wanted to say. I looked at her. In profile her face was beautiful too. The pronounced cheekbones, angled but not too sharp, the thick cluster of her black lashes and the watery chocolate of her eyes. She shook her head and tapped her cigarette. It fell to the wet pavement and she tucked her hand back inside, threading a line of fine black hair behind her ear. Dad said I’d never be as pretty as my mom. She was a model, you know? And might have been a super model if not for the cancer.

Ana. I mouthed her name, but couldn’t make the sound. I looked at her trimmed, nude nails. Her hand might have been a toy. Her fingers were chubby, short. Nothing like the rest of her. I wanted, badly, to touch her hand.

Suddenly she turned to me. Do I look sad? The last time, Jack and I had sex, after I came, he told me I looked sad. I wasn’t trying to. I don’t think I did. I was smiling.

She smiled now. You look beautiful, I said.

She stopped smiling and looked back at the window.

I stared at the pronounced hills of her knuckles and that wrist I could have clasped between my pinky and thumb. Hey, I said. Want to hear something?

She shrugged and her tank top shifted to reveal one satin bra strap. I swallowed. I told her the firetrucks joke. I talked for maybe a whole five minutes. Just wait, I said.

Finally I told her the punchline. It was a terrible joke. The worst I’d ever heard. I began to sweat. I didn’t dare to look at her face. I felt the silence swimming in my car, my fingers clutching the cold leather of the steering wheel. Then Ana laughed. A giggle that bubbled from her stomach. It got louder. I looked at her and her eyes squinted into the lines of an Anime character and her cheeks squeezed tight, her mouth contorting into every shape.  She clutched her bony arms to her chest. I started to laugh too. But Ana, Ana twisted into pretzels, shook her head and ruined the wisps of her perfect smooth hair. The corners of her eyes were wet.

My car quivered with our motion. Between fits of laughing she stammered that she couldn’t breath. We laughed and when it eased, she glanced at me or I glanced at her and it started all over again. Finally I placed my palm on top of the back of her hand, and squeezed. Her laughter faded back into trickles of giggles. She looked at me.

You don’t look sad, I told her.

Then Ana’s tongue was wrestling with mine, and I pressed my fingers into the notches of her spine. The moon glowed and the stars spun and then, just then, Ana was mine.

#short story #fiction #writing
/44 notes /07:37 PM

The Church

He remembers the church from when he was a boy. Languid summer days when it was hard to sit still in the rows of wooden chair, his feet dangling, not reaching the floor. He wanted badly to swing them except that his mother, in a pretty buttoned up blouse and pearls, would dart him warning looks any time she sensed movement. The pews were often full, with suits and neat pumps, pulled back hair. And this reverent look in the people’s eyes, a hushed awe.

The church is abandoned, now, and it had taken him a while to befriend the gatekeeper to allow him one final look. The old reassuring racks of hopeful candle flames were dead, dull empty clear holders, some still bearing the faint black marks from prayers of old. The majestic tapestries that once furnished the halls have been sold or stolen, leaving behind a vast naked gray wall. The few rows of chairs remaining upright looks lonely. A few has tentative lines of names and words carved on their backs, but he guesses something about the church still inspired enough propriety for the subdued signatures.

He looks up, at the black dome overhead, which always used to terrify him. Now it seems so befitting, bleak and beautiful. Yet, the windows, the brilliant dazzling displays of color, where he imagined heavenly visions might have appeared, God’s flashing eyes in between the panes of glass, remain as marvelous as ever. He stands still looking up for a long time before he hears the gatekeeper’s heavy footsteps echoing through the hall.

Read More

(Source: paintedfictions)

#fiction #short story #writing
/6 notes /09:26 PM

The Rocking Horse

Sometimes I start stories like this that I discover later and end up really liking. But by then I’ve forgotten what I wanted to write about in the first place, and I have tons and tons of these introductory openings, possibilities scattered in my folders. Where have these ideas gone now that I’m trying to write a novel? It shouldn’t be much more difficult than starting a short story, and yet…

My grandmother kept a rocking horse in her room. It was a worn, sickly looking thing, with dust smudging its desperate eyes, mane matted and woven with balls of dust.  It used to be brilliant and red, she told me. Now the paint was faded so that it resembled splotches of dried blood, and when the wind from the window rushed in it struggled to creep back and forth, back and forth, moving with a painful slowness. Whenever I went there, I tried not to look at the rocking horse, and to look at the shelves on the other side of the room instead. Grandmother had rows and rows of books, in English, Russian, French. I loved the slim, small volumes of foreign poetry I couldn’t understand. I sounded the strange words out loud and imagined that they were written for me. If grandmother was in a particularly good mood, she would let me open her old boxes of love letters and broken jewlery, tattered lace that smelled like decayed perfume. I asked her to tell me stories from her youth, the explainations behind the dedicated boys with beautiful handwriting named Benjamin or Tristan and grandmother always shook her head with a secret smile. Someday, someday, she said. 

I told her she should write a novel about her life. I was convinced there was so much to it. In old black and white photographs she always looked beautiful. Even as a shriveled old woman, her small green eyes still sparkled, and the patterns of wrinkles around her face couldn’t hide the mischevious life beneath. I didn’t like looking at her hands, though, the veins were blue and obvious, the skin stretched thin and brittle. Grandmother held her hands in a particular way, fingers lightly crossed at a soft, elegant slant. I imagined her as when she was young, often, imagined myself as growing to live exactly like her. 

When my grandmother died my mother was exhilarated to throw out the old horse. She never really loved grandmother and always treated her as a guest in our house. She didn’t need to explain, I guess. My grandmother was the sort of woman who always stayed distant. It gave her great allure but not much warmth, and I imagined she must have been very strict. I was happy to see it go. After that, though all of grandmother’s drawers and boxes were open to me now, I hesitated in going to her room. My mother asked for help in sorting out grandmother’s things, building big cardboard boxes marked donate, sell or keep, but I couldn’t go and see them.  My mother didn’t understand. She knew how I loved to sit in that room when grandmother was there. But I told her I was scared of ghosts, though it wasn’t true, and she went up there on her own, spending Saturday afternoons sifting through these countless things of old.

Years later, I left the house in Virginia and went to Paris for university. It was a marvelous place, and perhaps the only place I ever felt free. I loved walking along the Seine on rainy mornings, watching the pale buildings fade into the gray sky, and the small shops where a bell would jingle and a plump woman behind the counter waved a jolly “bonjour!” I spent much of my time sitting by the window reading, book after book, most in English, a few daring attempts to read in French. All my friends loved discussing the decadents and where to find the cheapest wine. I felt like I lived in a movie, a dream. 

One afternoon, I stopped in a small antique store on the way home. I had become obsessed with the idea of owning a vintage fountain pen, and one that wasn’t very expensive. I stared hard at the tiny objects beneath the dusty glass counters while the shopkeeper hummed to herself. There was nothing I was looking for. I glanced at the rest of the store and stopped at something tucked behind a pile of books and old photographs. It was a brighter red than I remembered, but had the same grayish mane and dead eyes. It was my grandmother’s rocking horse. But it was impossible.

Excusez moi, I said, and asked about the horse. The shopkeeper looked puzzled for a moment, then shuffled over to look. I wasn’t mistaken, it was the same size, the same despairing eyes. The woman didn’t remember where it came from, or what it was meant for. Sixty Euros, she said. I had no space in my room and not enough money and no reason to own it. I smiled and said merci, and went home. It must have simply been the same model, a simple coincidence. 

That night I dreamt of my grandmother, sitting alone in a vast room at a school desk, scribbling with a fountain pen. She was young and beautiful, but her hands were gnarled and old, and in exquisite cursive she wrote over and over the words “rocking horse.” There was rain rattling against the windows of the room and a lightbulb overhead that fizzled. The next day, as soon as it was late enough to make up for the time difference, I called my mother. “Darling! What a lovely surprise!” She said, forcing enthusiasm into her sleepy voice. 

I updated her on school and Paris. Then I asked her about grandmother’s rocking horse. “Do you know where she got it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She’s had that thing as long as I can remember. Wouldn’t let anyone touch or play with it, either. Kept it like something sacred.” She paused. “It used to scare me to pieces when I was a child.”

I took in a breath. “Do you think you could tell me about grandmother sometimes?”

“Well, sure. One of these days when you come home. We can go to tea and have story time. Sounds good?” 

It didn’t, really. I wasn’t going to be home for a long while, and I wanted to know now. But I told her it sounded like a lovely idea.

My father died a few months before I was born. It was an awful car accident that my mother adjusted to very quickly. I was born very small, and the doctors worried that I wouldn’t make it.  In lieu of grief, taking care of me became my mother’s obsession. She was still working as the receptionist at a small law office, and as much as she wanted to dedicate every second to cradling baby me, she couldn’t afford to lose the job without my father’s income. She turned to grandmother for help. Soon we were spending so much time at my mother’s childhood home that it became silly to maintain my mother’s own apartment. And besides, the apartment still carried traces of my father she didn’t want to think of. She said it would be a temporary thing, moving to grandmother’s, and I think she did mean it, at the time. 

I remember certain weekends, when I was four or five, my mother put on beautiful bright makeup and beamed at the men who showed up at our door. She always introduced me to them right away, and I marveled at their big hands and thick smiles. Sometimes they’d go out together afterward, and grandmother would shepherd me to her room and read me stories from her big books of fairytales, or they would look uncertain and wander off without her, and my mother would play with me for the rest of the night, twisting one strand of my hair between two fingers all the while, always with a bit of a look of surprise on her face, as if she didn’t quite believe that I was alive, hers. 

(Source: paintedfictions)

#fiction #short story #writing
/8 notes /03:12 PM

A Lost Cause

His hands reminded her of her father’s hands, the fingers stout, the nails flat and clipped, peeling slightly at the top. They felt soft against the side of her face though, gently pressing half moons into her cheek.

“This is the last time,” he said, and kissed her. Was he reassuring her or reassuring himself? Perhaps it didn’t matter. She returned his kiss just as hungrily, her hand at the back of his neck, fingers sinking into his hair.

The morning light was beginning its slow awakening outside, and she knew that if they didn’t fall asleep before it soaked through the ivory curtains all the way she would not have slept all night.

Right before he left he held her hands in the doorway and looked at her. “What?” She asked, laughing. “I want to remember you,” he said and brought each of her fingers against his lips.

“Goodbye, Claire.”

“Goodbye.” She said. She would shower and dress, in her pressed white blouse and tweed pencil skirt, the sensible patent leather pumps with the kitten heel. She would wear a tinted lip balm and put on a swipe of mascara. Silvia, the receptionist would ask her about her weekend and she would answer, too short, and her desk would greet her, the drab gray of the cubical walls and the faintly buzzing computer.

No one will know, she had whispered, the first time. It was dusk and they were walking to the train after dinner, a mediocre Italian restaurant in the West Village, mediocre and expensive. Their hands had accidentally touched across the table and she thought the candle made a particularly good display of his wedding band.

“I can’t,” he said. But on the subway platform as they stood side by side, she glanced up at him and he grabbed her hand. His palm was hot, slightly damp. He held on until it was her stop.

*

 No one really noticed her, at the office. She  was a copy editor at a lifestyle magazine where glamorous women paraded by every day, with curled hair and lined eyes and structured designer purses. Once, she had thought that she would be one of them. In college she had been the girl who went to her early morning classes with lipstick and a bright smile and ideas about the minute details of Dorothea’s wardrobe in Middlemarch. In high school she had lost her virginity in the back of a car with a boy with greasy black hair and a badly drawn tattoo of a rose and dagger on his upper arm. Her girlfriends had been shocked when she told them with a nonchalant shrug. In fact both of she and the boy had been unsure and the whole thing had been short and painful.

But sometimes after she graduated, after the parties and the stilettos she had spent all of her money and grown tired, she moved back to her home in Virginia. For a year she tried to write a novel. She fell in love (or at least that was what she told people) with a man who owned the neighborhood bar and moved in, talked of marriage. She spent many evenings, drunk, letting him marvel over her body and call her beautiful. She kept it up until she learned that she was pregnant, and the future she would have with him came to her in a series of nightmares that woke her up, screaming.

The doctor at the abortion clinic had kind blue eyes and the operating room smelled familiar, like the fancy pill boxes her grandmother kept. She never told him. She packed a few sets of clothes and moved back to New York.

The job hadn’t been hard to find. She simply asked the women who were her friends in college, all of them with neat mid-level jobs and smart haircuts. The one at the magazine, Amanda, had greeted her with barely veiled pity, and paid for lunch at a sushi restaurant that had just been reviewed in the New York Times. It’s so good to see you back, Amanda had hugged her goodbye, a light, loose hug. When she started working she rarely talked to Amanda, simply met eyes and smiled.

There was a calming sense of repetition to her job, the worm like black letters squirming across the page, the tiny errors she could correct. It was a good chance to listen in to the conversations around her, too, which almost always followed a caricature like pattern of predictability, talk of men and sex and shoes and cooking. 

(to be continued…)

(Source: paintedfictions)

#fiction #short story
/18 notes /04:51 PM

A Lost Cause (part 2)

(read part 1)

John had been one of her lovers in college. They had always skipped sleep in favor of each other, fucking on rooftops and in hurriedly locked bedrooms and stained bathrooms of loud bars. They would try to have conversations in coffee shops and wind up breathless, desperate to get elsewhere. She wasn’t surprised to hear of the marriage. Outside of her, he had a romantic sensibility, a kind heart. He had made vague attempts at a relationship, with her, even, dates and hand holding, but she was voracious for other people and would go out and show up at his door long past midnight, the taste of a stranger’s on her breath. He never turned her away.

When she called him to catch up, she hadn’t planned for a seduction, really she hadn’t. She wanted to see what had changed. But she felt no guilt, no. It was inevitable. And surely he understood, knew what he was getting into when he agreed to it. What they had was outside the bounds of time, convention, relationships.

But there had been a hint of finality that morning that she couldn’t shake off. She promised herself that she would not approach him again if he asked. She realized that his wife, a lovely woman she had met, deserved it. Still—she felt a tremble, a quiver between her legs as she remembered the way his arms pinned her wrists behind her back, how tantalizing his breath felt against her neck. She bit her lips quickly and returned her attention to the words in front of her.

 *

Her usual train was delayed that evening, and the platform had an air of suffocating restlessness. She tried to read, but the motions around her made it impossible. She watched a pair of girls in fringed tops and loud lipstick laugh, a hyper enthusiasm that could have only come from a newness to the city, perhaps tourists, perhaps Freshmen, and she felt a pang of jealousy. She got little joy out of her dim apartment and her aloof roommate. She still went on a walk in Central Park with the change of each season, but it felt tiresome, like she was trying to fulfill some standard of appreciation.

She had considered moving away, to an anonymous small town in the Midwest, where she would work for the local newspaper and give the writing thing another try. But that felt like giving up, even more than she already was.

At home she heated up the leftover soup for dinner and ate in in her room while she put on an old Marilyn Monroe movie. She left her window open, and the night air was a bit too cold, cutting into her bare arms. She fell asleep with the movie still playing at the foot of the bed, Marilyn’s breathless voice singing her lullaby.

 (To be continued…)

#short story #fiction
/13 notes /07:19 PM

A Lost Cause (part 3)

(read part 1, part 2)

There were things that Claire had never done. She had never, for instance, said I love you and meant it. It wasn’t something she felt bitter about, simply an abstract idea she had never bought into.

When she was much younger, her mother had tried to explain love. “It’s when you wake up next to someone and you feel grateful and right,” her mother had said, eyes lifting to the light from the open window in the kitchen.

“Is that how you feel with dad?” She had asked. Her mother had smiled a tense, tentative smile. “Of course, dear.” Her mother started to wash the dishes, and Charlotte carefully inscribed what she said in her diary.

She was very certain that she would be able to compare notes before her senior year of high school ended. She dreamt of the boy who would kiss her after prom and hold her face in between his cold palms.

Her parents divorced when she went to college. It was a practical, amicable thing, her mother told her. She simply wanted her independence back, and her father was away on business so often anyway that it was hardly a relationship. When she called her father he had told her, after a long silence, that there was a misunderstanding. Her imagination reeled for a while, but she soon realized that the divorce made little difference in her life. Her father’s elusiveness simply became more of a certainty.

She went to lunch with her father every so often. Her father looked tired and old and had little to say. He was starting to grow a beard and the silver in his hair was more pronounced.  “How are you,” her father asked, with slow nods when she answered. He was working long hours, still, rarely spending more than a week or two in the same city. Her father asked after her mother as he would a work acquaintance. Charlotte never knew how to answer.

* 

She wasn’t prone to loneliness but boredom, and she was afraid that she was going to be bored without John. She called her mother that night, after an evening of watching her silent phone. Her mother sounded older and older each time they talked. Her mother even repeated things some times, did I tell you dear about Mr. Gregor and his new car? He went whirling down the streets top down and gray hair bellowing. Her mother laughed as she did the first time she told it, and Claire  said, simply, softly, yes, mom.

She would have to visit home soon. Her mother was still asking her whether she was seeing any one. She wanted to answer yes, but it seemed equally exhausting to create an imaginary boyfriend. She wished her mother well and a goodnight. She pressed her cheek against her pillow and stared at the candle like light of her lamp. She was happy, she told herself. But then she had never really believed in happiness. 

#short story #fiction
/14 notes /06:00 PM