I Never Knew

1900 words

I Never Knew

Will you be okay tonight?

I’ll be fine, why wouldn’t I be?

I just don’t want you to be melancholy on your birthday.

You always use the funniest words. Melancholy.

You know what I mean. Call me when you start feeling down.

I’m sitting atop my duvet with a glass of red wine, a blue scrapbook on my lap. Brian left an hour ago, leaving me to wash the dishes in peace. It left me a lot of time to think--to be melancholy.

I’ve just turned thirty, and I’m in the mood for memories. My cat curls up next to my leg, lazily swatting the flicks of sunset light that bounce off the shiny pages as I open the scrapbook. I run my fingers over the sharp edges of the pictures, remembering.

            I open to a grainy old photo. It’s me--skinny, leggy, gap-toothed, my hair in tight pigtails that stick straight out above my ears. I’m clutching a puppy so tightly I can almost see its eyes bugging out. I close my eyes.

****

            I hear his car pulling up in the driveway and I run for the door, eager for him to grab me off my feet and swing me above his head until my wispy hair touches the doorframe. I remember the smell of the sunshine and the hot glare of the pavement outside--it must be July or August. Daddy has his hands behind his back. Suddenly nervous, I stop short.

            “Jamie,” he says, and I hear something in his voice I haven’t heard before. “Jamie--”

            I wait. My mother puts her arms around me from behind. They are cold and her skin is damp from washing. “Jamie,” she says into my ear. “We brought you something. But you have to be very careful with it and take good care of it yourself.”

My father slowly brings his hands out from behind his back. In them sits a squirming puppy, round-bellied and soft, pink skin showing through the fine hair. I open my mouth and squeal so high I stop making noise. I lunge for the puppy and wrap it in my arms, not caring that it squirms. It licks my face and I think I might faint with happiness.      

            My father kneels down, looking straight into my eyes. His eyes are wet as he watches me cuddle the puppy. “Now you’re big enough to have this responsibility. You have to take care of it.”

            “Yes!” I squeal. “She can have a pink collar!”

            Daddy tries to explain to me that Natasha is a boy. But all I remember is Mommy sinking onto the couch, watching us and crying. The sound of her sobs is as real to me as the warm, soft fur on the puppy’s belly. I remember falling asleep that night to soft puppy breaths on my cheek and Mommy’s sobs in the next room.

****

            Before I met Brian, I didn’t know that parents often give their children gifts to cover up the rifts that are growing between them. I never realized that Mom and Dad were moving apart, even then. To me, they were just two proud parents who’d made their little girl very happy.

****

My fingers brush over another picture, bringing back a sharp smell of disinfectant and white tile. People are everywhere--tall, gangly kids in braces and graphic tees and too-short pants, short, childish kids in braces with spiky hair. Puffs of perfume and cologne assault my nose. I hold my two thin spiral notebooks close to my chest, trying to hide the growing sweat stains I feel under my arms, as I search the endless progression of tiny metal plaques for my room number.

            I find it. The teacher is tall and has his hair slicked back, wearing a tee shirt and jeans with sneakers. He smiles at me as I walk in and I feel myself blushing. I smile back and make my way to a desk in the back. Everyone else in the room is head and shoulders taller than me and already talking in small groups. They look at me sideways. I move toward my desk and, like a shark swimming through a shoal of fish, I clear a path through the 6th-grade science class of Room 554, leaving me alone in a pocket with the teacher smiling at everyone but me.

            I drop my books on the floor when I try to put them in my desk and everyone stares at me as I pick them up, hundreds of fish eyes staring right at me, unblinking. They don’t make a sound but I can hear their laughter beneath their unsmiling faces.

****

            I pull out the picture, grimacing, and tuck it away toward the front of the book. Middle school was a difficult time. It was difficult for everyone, I supposed. I always thought that I’d just forgotten my deodorant that day. Before I met Brian, I didn’t know that I must have been experiencing a developmental delay in my growth and coordination.

I pull a picture out of the binding of the album. It must have fallen and gotten tucked away. It shows the perfect summer day, the grass a vivid shade of green.

****

I’m barefoot and I can feel the sponginess of the ground beneath the thick grass. We’re all wearing white and Mommy is holding onto me, trying to keep me from running off and spoiling my dress. She doesn’t have to hold on to me. The dress is the prettiest thing I’ve ever worn and if I stain it, Mommy will be upset. She’s been crying a lot recently and she’s gotten angry too. Natasha sits down a few yards ahead of us and starts pulling at the white ribbon around her collar. I call her back and she comes obediently.

            Mommy has not said a word to Daddy the whole day. She looks like she’s been crying. I don’t want to ask her about it because she spent two hours in the bathroom doing her makeup and if I make her cry again she’ll smudge it. So I don’t ask. Last time, she cried and then she yelled at me. Just a little; she was very upset. I don’t want to upset her--today is our family picture day!

            It’s hard to keep my eyes open because the sun is shining into them. But the photographer is nice and takes a thousand pictures. She gives me a sucker when she’s done.

            “We’re bound to have gotten one nice one,” she says as my parents give her a tip.

It takes forever to walk back to the car. I’m hungry and I wish my parents would hurry. They don’t, though. They just look at the ground when I tell them to hurry up.

            Daddy doesn’t open the car door for me like I’m a princess, bowing and helping me up with his hand. He just opens the door. I get in and buckle myself into my car seat. When I look up, Mommy is crying and there’s a streak of black makeup on her hand.

            “Mommy,” I say softly, waiting for her to get upset at whoever made her cry.

            “Might as well tell her now,” Daddy says. He’s holding the steering wheel with both hands and he doesn’t make vrooming noises when he starts driving.

            Daddy always makes vrooming noises when we pull away. Something is wrong. My stomach hurts and I feel like crying, but I try hard not to. Mommy needs me to listen. Natasha puts her head in my lap.

            “Baby,” Mommy says. “I have to move away. I can’t live with Daddy anymore.”

            For a second I think I might throw up. “Why?” I ask.

            “Daddy has done some very bad things.”

            Daddy’s hands hold tight to the steering wheel. I try not to cry but the tears hurt my throat. They buy me ice cream and I pet Natasha’s head, but it doesn’t help. I’m sick for days. A few days later, Mommy gives me the picture as she kisses me good-bye. It’s the most perfect picture of our family we’ve ever taken.

****

            Mom told me later that Dad cheated on her with a lot of other women. But I never knew that he probably cheated to relieve the stress of raising me while they both worked. I never knew...until I met Brian. It explained so much.

I hold the family picture as I turn the page. I pause over one on the second-to-last page of the album, touching it with my fingertips.

****

I’m standing outside, in front of a cluster of vines loaded with flowers. My hair is blowing in the warm breeze, covering my face. I’m laughing, a corner of a neon sign poking out from behind my head. I’m blissfully unaware of how much that coffee shop will change my life.

I step inside, hit with the warm, grassy smell of coffee and tea and essential oils. My friend heads to the restroom and I study a menu, scrawled in messy chalk calligraphy on a dusty board. I’m frowning over an iced or hot drink when he walks in and sits down at the counter, talking easily with the barista. He’s eye-catching, cute, with thick brown hair and a beard and a ratty, colorful sweater. His smile is a mile wide. My friend comes back and catches me staring and we laugh together, self-consciously smoothing our hair behind our ears.

It doesn’t take long for him to notice us. He orders another coffee and drums his fingertips on the counter while he waits. He winks over his shoulder at us.

As the barista hands him his coffee, her hand bumps the register. A little coffee sloshes out onto his hand. He jerks his hand away and slaps the counter, spitting profanity. My friend looks at me and giggles. “That must have hurt,” she says, swirling her own drink and taking another sip.

When I look back at him, he’s smiling, showing the barista all his teeth as he helps her mop up the puddle. He drops a dollar bill in the tip jar as he walks away.

“Hey,” he says, stopping by our table. “You look like new friends to me.”

He buys another coffee and sits down with us and smiles and laughs and chats. He’s charming, sweet, caring. He asks questions and listens genuinely to us, and he puts us right at our ease. When he leaves, he asks very politely for my number.

****

I pull the picture out of the album and smile at myself. If I’d known I’d meet him when I stepped inside, would I have looked different? Less carefree, more nervous? More relieved?

Meeting Brian has changed me. I hold the picture and look at it as the light fades and my wine gets warm on the table beside me. He helped me talk. He opened up my past. I’d always thought I got away with a pretty good life. But no one really understands how much childhood events affect adult behaviors. I’d thought I had a couple of sad things happen in my life, but I didn’t realize how much they’d really happened to me. How much they really hurt me.

I sigh and put the picture away, a faint shiver going through me.

Call me if you start feeling down, he said.

I run my fingers over the pictures. Their brilliance has faded a little. The feel of them beneath my fingertips fills me with...melancholy. I pick up the phone.

Before I met Brian, I never knew how much I never knew.

The Bridge

1200 words

The Bridge

I hold my breath as I approach the bridge at the edge of the world. He is moments ahead of me. The brilliant birds sing of a stranger beneath the trees. The shy jungle cats cry he has passed.

            I need not return home, the Grandmothers say, if I am not bold enough to take him, the last of his kind remaining on our world, before he crosses the bridge.

            I catch glimpses of his tawny body through the trees. The trigger on my blowpipe bulges beneath my fingertip; I raise it from my side as the trees thin around me. We near the bridge. The trees break, and he starts across the clearing, running fast and low.

            I break cover, pushing through a spiderweb covered in bright, jewel-toned drops, and shout.

            “Hey!”

            He freezes, one foot on the bridge.

            Glistening and slick, the bridge springs from the brilliant green side of the canyon, stretching into the hazy distance without suspension or pillar. Against the rainbow of sunlight glaring off it, his coloring is dim and tame. He eases his foot off the edge.

            I raise the blowpipe to my lips. The red sunlight flashes in tiny points off it as my hand trembles. My hand always trembles.

            His eyes meet mine across the space between us. His are brown, and they catch and reflect the light like the surface of a pool, all sharp twinkling points.

            I come from a race of mighty hunters. We have hunted his species all our lives. I learned it from my mother, and she learned it from her mother and she learned it from her mother, forever and forever into eternity. My finger tightens over the trigger button.

            He speaks.

            “You don’t know what you’re losing,” he says.

            My free hand flies to my translator, sitting just inside my ear. I tap it, my heart pounding—I turned it off an hour ago. The blowpipe drops to my side.

            “Please don’t shoot.”

            His voice is soft, smoother and deeper than anything I have heard before among the women in the city. It rumbles. It resonates in my bones.

            “Where did you learn to speak my language?” I demand. “The Grandmothers—”

            “The Grandmothers are wise,” he says. His body is rigid and upright and his sparkling brown eyes do not leave mine. If it were not for the voice, for the flat, square body—

            I cut myself off. He is still speaking.

            “They do not remember everything.”

            “They tell the ancient stories back a thousand years,” I say, shaking off the hypnotic pull of his voice. He is wrong.

            “They have forgotten what they once were.”

            Only once before have I hunted a creature—a tiger—with such eyes, large and innocent and frightened. I killed him right before he leaped at me. His words distracted me, flattering, fascinating words in an animal tongue through the translator I had forgotten to turn off. I swore I would make no similar mistake. Not with Man. Not with any other beast.

            I raise the blowpipe once again to my lips. My hand shakes so I can hardly sight down the barrel. The thought of killing a creature that speaks my language, that looks so unnervingly like me, sits like a hot pebble in my stomach.

            “You’ll never know, if you kill me,” he says, and I press the trigger.

            The little yellow feathers at the end of my dart never appear in his neck. His eyes meet mine, wide and smooth and no longer sparkling.

            The blowpipe slips from my fingers. I have missed. The blowpipe cracks as it hits the ground.

            “What were they before?” I ask. I can hardly force the words out.

            “We were all the same.”

            His curious voice, of all the jungle creatures the closest to my own, yet so different, holds my ear spellbound.

            “Before the Grandmothers,” he explains, “there were spacemen. They came and built cities and left ancestors. We were all the same, then, your people and mine.”

            I look down to my cracked blowpipe, lying half-hidden in the jungle grass at my feet. I pick it up.

            “Your kind always tells that story,” I say. I can hear the Grandmothers’ rebukes for the broken blowpipe and empty hands even now. Without a weapon, I realize how much larger he is than me, and I wonder how fast he can move.

            “What lies beyond this bridge?” he asks suddenly.

            “Chaos,” I answer, sliding my fingers into the chamber of the blowpipe and extracting my spare dart. I handle it with my fingertips, careful not to get the poison under my skin. The answer is the one the Grandmothers give the first time they take their daughters to see the bridge at the edge of the world.

            “Did they tell you that?”

            My answer hurts the back of my throat, so I do not make it.

            “Just a yes or no,” he says. His voice is thick and warm like fresh milk.

            “Yes,” I mutter.

            “Look,” he says. He turns and points; across the chasm, rising above the wet jungle haze, stretch five long, jagged fingers of glass.

            “They’re buildings,” he says. “Left by the spacemen who came before the Grandmothers. When we were all one.”

            I stare out over the chasm at the glinting buildings, my mouth open.

            I can’t believe I’m talking to him. Believing him. My prey. The Grandmothers would be furious. But why is it they would not tell us if such a thing were true?

            “How do you know?” I ask.

            “We, too, have our stories,” he says. He puts one foot back on the bridge. The skinny length of it begins to bounce up and down under his weight.

            I stare out across the chasm, across the mist, into the endless distance. “A city?” I ask.

            “Yes.”

            Impossible.

            “Why are you going?”

            “Because the Grandmothers have forgotten,” he says, “what it is like to be one.”

            I look again into his wide eyes, and a little hot longing awakens inside me to see what he will see and to hear the ancient stories still more ancient than my own.

            “And you will find out?” I ask.

            “Perhaps we can learn it again.” He shrugs. I wonder if he might be right, that we and Man were one in the years past.

            I look at the yellow dart I have concealed in my hand. The Grandmothers will be angry when I come home empty-handed. I will tell them that I dropped my blowpipe. I will tell them he escaped. They will be angry but it will pass.

            “Watch for it,” he says, turning back to the bridge. His back is broad and his neck exposed.

            I look at the dart and drop it to the ground. He steps out onto the bridge, bouncing up and down with the chasm winds. And then he disappears, and the bridge is still, and I have failed. Far in the distance, the fingers of glass buildings poke up into the sky.

            Without taking my eyes off them, I place my own foot onto the slick glass surface of the bridge and commit myself to the chasm winds.

           

Sharp Edges

Word count: 1200

Sharp Edges

“...death toll in the tens of thousands, making this the deadliest epidemic in the U.S. in hundreds of years. Vaccines are available, but there is a severe shortage…”

Lola clicked out of the broadcast.

“What’s wrong?”

Her legs were tangled in gym shorts and her duvet. “I’m just cold,” she said, pulling her baggy sweatshirt down over her knees. “From the ice cream.” She touched his face on the computer screen. “I miss you.”

“I’m glad you’re not here.”

“That bad?”

She’d tried not to sound worried, but he shifted into a cheery tone. “We can tell who’s sick, so it’s easy to avoid. It sucks to tranquilize people who are just having an allergic reaction, though.

“Wilsonville thought it was a stomach bug at first.”

The camera angle on screen shifted as he sat down. His hair was wet and plastered to his head from a shower, and he was wearing the tacky t-shirt he’d worn to Disneyland last month. A middle-aged man and woman in saggy, stained coveralls walked by, their voices interrupting his.

“Wilsonville?” He sighed. “Nobody at home has it, right?”

She hesitated a beat. “No.” Shoving aside her empty pint of ice cream with the plastic spoon balanced inside, she wriggled down onto her stomach. She tried not to wince at a sharp pain in her abdomen.

“Babe?”

“I’m fine. Just sensitive to dairy.” Another sharp pain shot through her stomach and she drew her knees up toward her chest. “Maybe the ice cream wasn’t a great idea.”

“Take some Tums or something?” he said, his forehead crinkling.

She smiled. “I’ll be fine. My fault.”

“I can’t wait to see you again.”

“I love you,” she said quietly. She would never see him again. He didn’t know. He was too optimistic.

“You should get some sleep.”

“Okay.”

He blew her a kiss and signed off. She slowly closed the top of the laptop and pulled it close to her. It was as close as she could get to him.

****

“It’s worse than you thought, isn’t it?”

Over the phone, her voice was scratchy. Sweaty palms slipping on the steering wheel, he shook his head even though she couldn’t see him. “We’re making a difference. That’s what matters.”

Always the disease, taking up time they could have spent talking about their future—if they could even have a future together.

“How do you know when people have it?”

He frowned. “People complain of sharp internal pain or constant coldness. And we assume everyone has it.” She had been so interested in his work with the disease lately.

“That sucks.” She sniffed.

“Bad allergies today?”

She coughed a little. “Uh, yeah. Something in the air.”

He looked down at the tiny syringe nestled in a bundle of protective wrapping, tucked into his cupholder. If he could only get her mind off the disease for a while.

“How’s school?” he asked, his hands slipping on the wheel again as he turned down the long gravel driveway.

She laughed. He’d missed that laugh. “Closed indefinitely. But Mrs. Brighton is still making us do our English homework!”

“Of course she would! What are you reading?”

“We’re writing. Essays.”

He blew a raspberry.

“Exactly.”

For a moment, they could pretend they weren’t waiting for the disease to come and pop the safe bubble they called home.

Her house appeared at the end of the lane. He dropped one hand from the wheel, his fingers curling around the syringe.

As he got out of the car, raising his phone to his ear, he dropped the syringe in his pocket.

“Hey, babe, I have a surprise for you.”

She gasped softly. “What?”

“Open your front door.”

“Jack, if you—”

“Just come to the door.”

“But—”

He shifted the phone to his other side as he stepped onto the porch. Just on time, the door swung open. She stood framed in the opening, wrapped up in a blue flannel shirt and sweatpants.

Her hand went to her mouth.

He swung his arms out wide, grinning. “It’s me!”

“Don’t you dare!”

She took a step back, but he was already moving. He reached in and grabbed her hand, pulling her close.

“Your hand is so cold,” he said, and then he realized she was crying.

“Why did you come?” she asked.

“What’s wrong? Don’t cry.” He looked into her face, with its red eyes and upturned, freckled nose. She sniffled and didn’t answer, just looked at him as though her eyes were starved for the sight of him.

Something glinted on her chin—a stray tear. He reached out to brush it away. She flinched away from his hand.

“What is that?”

“Hives. From the…milk.” She ducked her chin.

But he’d seen it. A flat, shiny spot. She had it. And it would spread quickly, turning her skin to diamond-clear crystal. His stomach churned, reminding him why he was there.

“Here, I brought you something.” He breathed in deeply and pulled the syringe from his pocket. “To hold you over until this all ends.”

She laughed stiffly. “Drugs?”

“A vaccine.”

Her big eyes snapped from it to his face.

“You stole one?”

He almost jumped at the hard crackle in her voice. “Look, I can’t—”

“All those sick people and you stole—”

“I can’t lose you!”

Silence.

“Okay? I have to know you’ll be okay.” He spoke softly. “It was going to save someone. It might as well be someone I love.”

She hugged herself. He wished he’d be able to propose to her one day.

“Take it.”

She reached out and gently took it. “We should both—”

“There’s only enough for one person. Don’t waste it.”

She turned it over in her hand, then looked him in the eye.

“It’s too late.”

He knew, but watching her pull her hand from her pocket and show him another telltale scab hurt.

“It’s not. Take it; it might help.” He felt sick to his stomach. Every moment was a moment the vaccine could be working.

“That means you have it too, Jack,” she said. A tear slid down her cheek and over another spot appearing on her chin.

“Take it, now. I’ll get another one. Please.” He was suddenly afraid she would drop the syringe. He wanted to hold her. But it hovered between them, shining.

She uncapped it.

For a minute she couldn’t speak. Then she dropped the cap on the ground and slid her fingers into the proper place.

She took a deep breath, then smiled gently and plunged the syringe into his arm.

He pulled away, but it was too late. His heart hammered against his ribs and spots faded in and out over the picture of her. The syringe shattered on the ground and she wrapped her arms around him. Her skin was ice cold against his and tears soaked the front of his shirt.

“Just remember I love you,” she said through them.

“Lola—”

“You go save people. For me. Okay?”

The crystal on her body spread under his fingertips. It was too late. He hugged her close and cried into her hair. He had tried to save someone, and he had only saved himself.

All-Consuming

Word count: 500

All-Consuming

Hissing acid rain beat on the wide glass windows, glowing red with the reflection of the fire. Beneath the window, an old man’s head jerked up from the pen strokes he studied like bacteria beneath a microscope. He peered at the fireplace, a heavy frown etched deep into his face.

The door swung open, creaking. A young man closed it softly behind himself.

“Father, it’s time.”

The old man stood and trudged toward the bookshelves lining the far wall. Books crammed together so tightly that the shelves sagged in the center. He glared at the shelf, eyes running along the worn spines.

The young man put his hands into his pockets, his voice weary as if he were repeating instructions to a toddler for the fifth time. “Father.”

“We do not need to go,” the old man said. He selected a heavy book and glared at his son as he opened it. Tree branches scraping the window echoed in the room like miners working through the night to breach enemy defenses.

“The rain’s through the attic ceiling already. We need to get to the safe zone.”

The old man frowned at the diagrams on the page. “I need to solve this problem.”

“Father—” The young man gripped his father’s shoulder with a hand like a talon. “Your books aren’t going to protect you.”

Wind rattled in the chimney. The old man threw off the hand, frowning fiercely.

“This is the only way to end it!” he almost shouted, his old voice as raspy as the branches drawing across the windows—quieter now, though the rain hissed down, unrelenting, eating everything in its path.

“You cannot stay here! No one can stop it!”

The old man met his son’s eye. The firelight reflected on the dark, dilated pupils.

“You mean you cannot.” Plunking into his chair, the old man buried his head in his hands. The elements howled in his ears, dragging at his thoughts, filling them. He stared again at the charts and scribbles on his paper.

“This is it,” he said, under his breath, to no one in particular. “It has to be.”

The paper, littered with chemical symbols and diagrams, fluttered as the young man approached.

“We don’t have time for this—"

“No!” The old man flung his arm backward, backhanding the young man across the nose. He stumbled backward into a bookshelf. The wind shrieked outside, unencumbered by the tree the rain had already consumed. Around the edges, steaming foam began to seep in at the window.

“All right.”

The young man straightened, wiped his mouth, and walked to the door. It snapped shut behind him.

The old man, panting, slid his head into his hands and tangled his fingers in his thinning white hair, pulling at it. Rocking back and forth, he stared at the papers on the desk and muttered.

This is all we need. All we need. All we need.

At the window, the rain worked its way in, nearer and nearer.

The Library

Word count: 1000

The Library

The Marien house stood behind two grinning stone lions at the end of a crackled cobblestone path. Maeve brushed one of the paws for luck as she passed. Old raindrops hung from the ivy above the ancient door.

Inside, Old Marien hovered behind a reception desk, a short stack of precise papers resting on the desk in front of her. Her withered shoulders stooped forward and her brilliant eyes, sunk in a mass of wrinkles and cavities, stared right at Maeve as she made the long walk down the entryway to the desk.

“Have you thought about it?”

Maeve smiled. “I’m ready.”

Old Marien pointed with one long, remarkably straight finger at the pen. A faint smell of incense rose from her clothes as she moved.

“Sign on the first and last page.”

When Maeve set the pen back in the inkwell, Old Marien’s long fingers closed around the stack of paper and drew it backward. 

“One year,” Old Marien said. Her seamed face cracked into something like a smile, lined with yellow teeth. “You know the boundaries. Cross the lions and your deposit is forfeit.”

Maeve offered a handshake across the desk. Old Marien ignored it. Upright except for the stooped shoulders, she set a single skeleton key in the center of the desk, picked up her pocketbook, and left. The door clunked shut behind her.

Maeve made a beeline for the library.

****

Old Marien had lit a fire in the library. Draped in a blanket in one of the two overstuffed black easy chairs in front of the fireplace, Maeve looked out across the room, lit from dim yellow wall sconces. Stacks of books cast long shadows across the room and holes gaped black on shelves where books used to be.

Nearly two a.m. The hour he always appeared. Maeve squinted into the dim room.

The newspaper ad had been the strangest Maeve had ever seen. Beneath the toe of her paint-stained black sock one morning, she had caught sight of it. Marien family seeking to dispose of their mansion in town. The house would go to anyone who could remain on the grounds for a year.

No caveats. Maeve had checked. She had been the only applicant.

And she knew why. Maeve opened her book, still scanning the room. She had seen him on her long late night walks past the house.

The Marien house was haunted.

Maeve’s eyelids drooped, the soft roar of the fire smothering her senses. On the edge of sleep, she thought something cold passed over the fire. But she startled awake to find nothing there. The draft in the chimney pulled the fire up in jagged gasps. 

She shivered and settled deeper into her blanket. She sat by the cold fire, watching for him, until the sun rose.

****

He did not appear that night. Nor the following night. Nor the night after that. Maeve went to bed as the sun rose, catnapping on a bed that felt larger than her entire apartment, and in the evenings she painted, listening to jazz records and drinking hot honey lavender tea. She left the door open to the patter of the evening rain and the chatter of the evening traffic on the sidewalk.

And then, as the night quieted and sank toward midnight, she crept into the library and settled into her armchair, watching. Waiting.

He never appeared.

A tiny sliver of moon cleared the top of the fence and hung in the sky, shining faintly. Maeve pulled her jacket closer, catching a whiff of the paint she’d spilled onto the sleeve, and closed the front door. Faint strains of Frank Sinatra floated into the dim hall from the kitchen. Sliding a little on the smooth floor in her socks, Maeve made her way toward the kitchen, draining the last of her tea. She glanced in at the library, shrouded in gloom and the faint glow of the fire that never quite died, in passing.

She froze, the record suddenly distant and tinny.

In one of the armchairs by the fireplace sat a long, lean figure, washed-out and faded. Small round glasses caught the firelight as he bent over a book open in his lap. The pages rustled as he turned them, searching for something.

Maeve took a soft step into the room, blinking hard. The figure was pale but not transparent. He wore a smoking jacket of a deep hunter green. 

He was beautiful. For a long moment Maeve wondered what his story was, wished she had her notebook in her hands to draw him as she drew the rest, to preserve him for posterity.

She took another step forward. The pages ruffled as he continued to turn them, still searching for something. What a life, to be constantly doomed to searching for answers.

Maeve’s socked foot slid across a rough patch in the flooring and she stumbled. Catching herself, she slowly straightened and let out a long, silent breath before she looked up. 

Straight into his eyes. 

Stomach sinking, Maeve found herself unable to look away from pale brown eyes staring at her, unblinking. 

Never look them in the eyes, she remembered, too late.

The book closed and he laid it on the table beside his chair. He unfolded himself and stood, long-limbed and still intently focused on Maeve. The pale brown eyes were deep and wide and sparkling. Maeve leaned forward, fighting the urge to push closer. 

She had months left in the house. Months to study him. Months to possibly put him to rest. If she could just avoid touching him. 

She reached out. Her fingers closed on cold air. 

Instantly roaring filled her ears, then the chatter of a thousand people. Images flashed through her mind--people, faces. Waves of heat and cold swept over her body and she gritted her teeth so she would not scream as her stomach sank.

When she opened her eyes he was gone. He left only the ruffling pages of an open book behind. 

Glory, Glory, Hallelujah

Word count: 1250

Glory, Glory, Hallelujah

Leeland stared with vacant eyes at a tattered banner, its blue and gold barely visible between gaping holes, half-hidden beneath a slick of red mud and the edge of the tent canvas. The wadded-up coat beneath his head was wet and warm from the heat of his body. A fitful breeze brought tendrils of smoke wafting over the rows of sick and wounded, carrying the scent of someone’s supper or the reek of blood.

Sounds of pain filled the hospital tent. Outside, muddy boots and striped trousers huddled in a circle. A voice floated down, droning over a list of the dead.  

Arthur J. Fielding. Joseph Jameson. Isaiah Weatherfield.

In his camp, would they do the same for the poor Rebel boys who’d fallen three days before? Would his name appear in the endless columns? Would they read it out in church, mourning the boys who never made it home?

A scream, sharp and terror-filled, pulled him back with a jolt to the world of dying men.

“I’m sorry you have to hear that.”

Leeland opened his eyes. Standing against the light was a young woman, her white apron spattered with dark spots, her hair in a thick braid down her back.

“I tried to get them to set up another tent for the doctor, but they wouldn’t,” the young woman said, bending over Leeland and handing him a bit of bread. Another scream broke the quiet din of the hospital and Leeland and the young woman flinched.

“Does a body no good to hear the screams like that.”

She began to turn away and Leeland instinctively reached out to stop her with his right arm. A blast of pain blinded him, and images flashed across his eyelids.

The soul-shaking booms of artillery. Earth dug up at his feet by the shells. Eddie, holding the banner, the life winking out of his vacant eyes as he fell down, down, down…

A gentle touch on his forehead woke him from memories as the pain subsided to a dull roar.

“Can I get you anything?” the young woman asked.

Leeland shook his head slowly, careful not to move his arm, afraid to look and see what part of him was missing. “You—what’s your name?”

“Elsie.”

She was too kind, the touches of her hands too soft to be roughened by the curses and groans he heard around him.

“Elsie. You should be at home…” Leeland tried to remember the movements of his mother’s hands as she sat in the parlor making boxes for “those poor boys.” Anything to distract himself from the sudden remembrance that he was no longer a whole man.

“…making bandages,” he finished. “What are you doing here?”

“We all have to do what we can.” She smiled. “Can I do anything for you?”

“No.” Leeland closed his eyes, the smile on her face too much for him to look at.

After a moment, she left, letting a thin ray of light fall across his face. He raised his good arm and covered his eyes, hoping with the light to block out the sounds and the smells.

He could block the sounds and smells, but he couldn’t block the rabid faces charging behind his eyes, snarling like wolves freshly fed. If he had not believed in hell before, he did now.

Later, the doctor came by. He was a burly, rough man in a stained gray shirt, his pockets bristling with tools, his suspenders barely clinging to his Union-striped trousers over a bulging barrel chest. He was stained with blood all over and his heavy mustache accentuated a deep frown.

The doctor reached him and loomed over him, his heavy brows lowering over his eyes. A meaty hand reached down and grabbed Leeland’s bad shoulder, sparking a wildfire of pain that blurred his vision. The doctor’s face twisted into a disgusted expression dripping with even more hate than Leeland had seen on the battlefield. He spat.

“Rebel.”

Leeland cursed him softly as he fell back, too overwhelmed to do more.

Elsie returned in the wake of the doctor, leaving a blanket of quiet in her wake. As the wounded settled to what sleep they could in the candlelight, a group of men outside began singing.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…

Some glory, Leeland thought. It was supposed to be quick. They were supposed to add a couple of Yankee scalps to their belts and return home yelling and screaming, covered in glory.

Elsie leaned over him, the flickering lamplight forming a shifting halo around her head. She handed him a dipper of water, laced with something sweet that spread warmly through his body and began to numb his senses.

“Elsie.”

She set the dipper back into a tin of water by her side. “Yes.”

“Do you have a newspaper?”

The voices drifted in as Elsie went to fetch the paper.

Glory, glory, hallelujah…

“Is there anything in there about the 41st Regiment?”.

Elsie settled on her knees next to him. “We don’t have a 41st—”

“Confederate,” Leeland said.

Elsie’s eyes widened. She opened her mouth as if to speak.

Leeland braced himself. He would probably die anyway. What use was it to find out the fate of his comrades?

Elsie raised the paper to the light and squinted at the page. After a moment she began to read, softly, her voice rising and falling like the flicker of the light.

“In the action against the 14th and 21st Regiments, on the 3rd Instant, the 41st Regiment sustained:

Killed: Joe Curtis, Leslie Springer, Major John Sutherfield…”

Her voice went on and on softly, a soothing sound that reminded Leeland of his oldest sister reading to him when a small child.

I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps…

As the drug filled his head with cotton, images drifted back through Leeland’s mind. He could almost hear the band playing, the day his town marched out to war. The echoes of the joyful sounds as the young men spun stories around fires at night, sang songs. Then the hard edges in voices, the whispered accusations, the name flying from tongue to tongue, bitter in each mouth. Yanks. Yanks. Yanks.

Leeland interrupted Elsie’s reading. “Don’t you hate us?” His tongue moved slowly in his mouth.

The paper snapped as Elsie dropped her hands. “Do you want me to hate you?”

“We hate you,” Leeland said, drifting.

“Do you?”

It was the last thing he heard from her. A cool touch from her fingertips lingered on his forehead as her shadow moved away, and the echo of her words floated to him.

Behind his closed eyes rose a blue and gold flag, streaming bright in the sunshine over gold trim and fresh starch. Gold thread sparkling, it merged with a sea of flags, blue and red and gold, waving over a bristling field of rifles and gray coats, borne on the broad shoulders of the glory of the little southern towns, bright-eyed and wet behind the ears.

Then artillery, crashing into the morning. Officers screaming orders. Gray coats stained with blood and mud. Smoke. Lumps on the ground that turned out, hours later, to be the bodies of comrades. Lungs burning. Rifles jamming.

The flag, full of holes, stained with smoke, trampled in the mud.

Outside, the singers began their fourth chorus, the strains of the song tapering off into the countryside.

Glory, glory, hallelujah

Our God is marching on…