I write fiction. Short stories, mostly. This is one I finished not too long ago. I’ll be posting it here, in installments.

Clive Sheppard awakened one morning with a strange silence nestled in his being.  An absence. And he knew then, suddenly. This is all you get, he said out loud, completely without warning, and yet as though reading from a manual. It was very much like the moment, twenty minutes or so after an aspirin, at which his temples would suddenly stop throbbing.  He got up, got dressed and put on a pot of coffee, all the time exploring the new quiet tentatively, in the manner of a tongue poking at the gap where a tooth has been: how big a gap is it? Does it hurt? And then, seconds later: is it still there, this gap?  He ate toast over the sink, sipping the too-hot coffee hastily.  He was strangely relieved when he burned the roof of his mouth.  Without the buzzing promise of Someday filling the crevices of his being, the rest of his life loomed and rushed at him, parching his mind and giving him a kind of snow blindness.  The skin peeling away from the roof of his mouth made a pleasant focal point.

Coming back into the hushed bedroom for shoes, he glanced at his wife.  Pointed sections of her newly blonde hair fluffed over one eye.  She seemed somehow vulnerable.  For a moment he regretted the tepid response he’d given her makeover when, grinning nervously, she had picked him up from the airport the week prior.  On the drive home she had been angry, flattened. To make it up to her, he had called in sick the next day. Look after me for a change. Tell them you’re jet-lagged. It wasn’t so much that she missed him.  She was just tired of being alone.

She stirred suddenly, and he froze, willing her to remain asleep. When her breathing evened out again, he picked up his shoes and crept out, shutting the door behind him.

In the car he re-played the scene in his mind; Blonde Fiona stirring, Weak Clive freezing. It had always been that way, except at the very beginning. (The Party to End All Parties, he’d called it once. Only once; he tried not to make the same mistakes twice.) Back then he had been Serious Clive.  He had done as he had been expected to do.  Kept his head down, went to school, worked hard.  There had been no protest marches, no rock bands, no cocaine habits, no arrests, no dramatic, exhaustive love affairs.  He had slept with exactly two women while in college; neither of them exotic or even crazy; just a little drunk and willing to endure his quiet attentions. The second, Fiona Wilson, had wound up pregnant. End of story. This is all you get. And a burned mouth.

© Emma Alvarez Gibson 2009.  All rights reserved.

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