One Page Love Story- Share the Love

by Rich Walls et al.

  The memory of his old life had begun to fade again with the first pill, but still left impressions. A mother, a father, a few friends, and later, he was pretty sure, a wife. His flight training, however, was vivid, as though it happened yesterday. The pills knew which memories to suppress.

  But he hadn’t taken the second one.

  He had precisely one hour to report for duty. New shift workers were allowed that hour to reorient themselves, get their bodies adjusted from deep sleep, and to eat.

  Jace would do none of those things.

  The freezer room was busy with the next set of workers coming out of thaw. He didn’t have much of a plan, but if he was caught, he could always blame the confusion of awakening.

  He followed the rows of metallic bullets, each holding a male worker whose face filled a small window. Row C, D, E. Only the men were ever awakened. He didn’t have the clearance to know why.

  A thaw technician glanced up at him, but his attention was quickly redirected back on the man in the freezer at his feet, who was vomiting. Jace ducked down another row.

  At the back wall, he’d only gotten to M, but a door led to another room. He tested the lever.

  Unlocked.

  This room hummed at a different frequency. He moved along the rows, now up to P. He didn’t know what he might find in T35 but stopped dead when he spotted a window filled with flowing blond hair. A woman.

  He hurried now, wondering what he had wanted himself to find. His pace was frantic, delicate faces lined up like — what — dolls? In boxes? What memory was that?

  T25.

  T30.

  He slowed down.

  The window of T35 had clouded around the edges. Jace leaned in. This woman was more beautiful than any of the others, onyx hair billowing around her pale face, light glinting off it like stars.

  He pressed close to the glass. His wife. She was real. His life before the forced evacuation from Earth flooded through his memory like a pipe bursting. Holding hands. Kisses. A wedding night.

  A hand closed on his shoulder. “You seem to have forgotten this.”

  Jace turned to the nameless man, eyes on the pill held out on a deeply lined palm. Jace nodded, understanding his duty, his training, but still, he fingered the note in his pocket. Next shift, he would find it again. Even if he only got to see her a few seconds each time, it would be enough.

  THE STRAY

  Avery wrapped the slices of bacon around his finger to make a tight roll. The date on the package said two weeks ago, and he figured his mama was gonna throw it out anyhow. Since his daddy left a month ago, she hadn’t cooked nothin’. Avery got by on the big bags of cereal from the bargain store while she sat in the back room, watchin’ old lady TV shows where girls were always cryin’ and carryin’ on like they’d been wupped.

  He snatched a paper towel from the roll and bundled up the meat in case she came out. Not that she’d notice anyhow. If they passed each other in the house, it was like two ghosts ‘fraid to look the other in the eye, like they might have to admit they’re dead.

  Avery tried not to think about his daddy or where he mighta gone. Sometimes he opened the drawer where his mama had stashed their wedding picture and peered into his daddy’s pale face. The blue eyes stared back at him cold like marbles. He’d never had much to do with him nohow, but Avery sure wished the man hadn’t stolen his mama’s spirit when he left.

  The back door squeaked a little as he opened it, and he paused, a habit from the old days when his mama would ask him where he was going and what he was up to. He shrugged and passed on out, holding tight to the bundle. He was careful with the bacon, like his boxes of cereal, not to run out too fast. He wasn’t sure what would happen when it was all gone.

  He ran along the back alley, crossing under the old cement bridge that nobody used now that there was a big highway farther up, and bent down to peer into the hollow length of a metal drain.

  “Buster? You here?” He couldn’t see in the shadow of the pipe for a few seconds, till his eyes worked again. But he heard a soft whine and knew Buster was there.

  “Come on, boy.” Avery unwrapped the bacon and the smell of it must have worked, because Buster started sliding forward, his hind legs bumping along the ridges, until he got close enough to sniff at Avery’s hand.

  He wasn’t a beauty or nothin’, his brown fur matted and missing in places. He had black patches in back, probably from whatever happened to make his legs not work. But he was polite, his black eyes turning up to Avery as if to ask permission to eat.

  “It’s all yours, buddy,” Avery said and spread out the roll so Buster wouldn’t eat it too fast.

  Buster ate the bacon slowly, like a good dog, like he wasn’t starving. Avery stroked his head. He didn’t know how long the little dog could keep going, and he didn’t know how to get help. But as long as he had something to bring him, Avery would take care of him, and there wasn’t nobody nowhere who could tell him not to.

  ADAM STANLEY

  Adam Stanley is a poet and musician living in North Georgia. In 2014, he released his debut novel, All My Sins Remembered.

  THE SKETCH

  In the fading light, the old street-artist hunched over his sketch pad. It was almost dark, and the contours of her face were only visible in shadow. We had planned on visiting Notre Dame, but when she saw the old man on the quay that runs along the river, sitting on a little stool in front of a shaky looking easel, surrounded by his windblown gallery of chalk drawings that were hanging on the rock wall beside the bridge, we stopped.

  “I want one,” she said.

  “Notre Dame probably closes at dark,” I answered.

  “We might could still make it,” she said, and smiled.

  He finished in about an hour, and it was an amazing portrait. Her face was flawless, the high cheekbones and slightly pouting lips rendered perfectly in charcoal. The early winter wind was brisk and cold, and he had even been able to capture that glassy look in her eyes as she sat patiently, though uncomfortable, trying not to move.

  We never made it to the tour of the cathedral. Instead, we went to a jazz bar and drank red wine until daylight.

  I don’t know where it is now, the charcoal sketch of your face that we got in Paris many years ago. Maybe you have it, and you framed it and put it on the wall beside your wedding photo, and photos of your children. It could be hidden away in the top of some closet, beneath the picture albums that you no longer look at, like all of the other evidence of our time together.

  The best moments are those moments that feel like they have been stolen, not necessarily from someone else, but from life itself. At the time, it feels as if it were not supposed to happen, that you have somehow fooled fate, and changed your destiny, if only for a few minutes out of a lifetime. But later, maybe years, maybe decades in the future, no matter what happened after, that moment always stands out as something that was meant to be. And no matter how trivial or insignificant it may seem, because it meant something once, it was, in hindsight one of the most important moments of your life. That cold day, down by the Seine, was one of those moments.

  I sometimes wonder what happened to that old street-artist. I wonder how many other faces he has drawn? How many other memories he has made real forever? How many other moments has he turned into an eternity.

  OUR HOUR IN EDEN

  A song in the distance awakened me, and I followed what was left of your voice like the tracks of an animal to the edge of the copper water. Though I knew there were Cottonmouths thick as ropes, I waded into the cool shadows and then up a hill where trees grew, preordained, laid out in perfect rows like headstones. When I had reached that place where we had left the past, and shed even our skins for love, I saw them: the blackberries surrounded by briers. Supple and sparkling as jewels. The same ones that we had subsisted on, with bleeding fingers, for one afternoon of our lives when the sun was still warm enough to protect us from the world. And though I remembered all the fears and burdens we shared l
ike sackcloth and ashes, and I knew the danger of reaching into the unknown, (it seemed like there were serpents waiting beneath every beautiful thing) blindly grasping for the sweetness that everyone longs for, and I too have always feared those things I cannot see, I put my faith in the innocence of nature. I tried to believe in the benevolence that exists if you go beyond the fear, and so I found them again: the blackberries, the fruit not forbidden to those who love, huge and succulent, and so full of grace, they were almost too heavy to bear.

  I SHOULD HAVE SAID SOMETHING

  I saw her at the County Fair, standing in line for the Gravitron. She was eating pastel blue cotton candy and she was beautiful, the way she squinted as the last rays of sunlight fell across her face and lit up the horizon like a silent explosion, before it sank behind the trees. I was about to go over to her and say hi, but then I saw that there was an older guy with her. He had black hair, except for his bangs, which were bleached white and hung down across one side of his face. He brushed his bangs away and put his hand on her shoulder. He ran his fingers through her hair, and kissed her on the cheek. I should have said something anyway. Instead, I watched as they got on the ride and the doors closed and she was gone.

  I walked around the rest of the night in a haze. The air was thick and noxious from the diesel smell of the rides, and sharp with the pungent odor of the livestock exhibits and rotting food in trash cans made from barrels, but it all mixed with the sweet scent of candied apples, cotton candy and popcorn, creating the wonderful smell of childhood nights spent at this same fairground, when the glowing, spinning lights of the giant Ferris Wheel were scary, yet exhilarating. That smell, sometimes so strong it was impossible not to turn away and almost gag, that at other times was so sugary and so sweet that you could almost taste it, was the setting for a parable that I could not have yet understood. An allegory of the bittersweet nature of our lives.

  SUMMER SNOW

  I never thought I would be this old. But we were young once, like everyone is young once. Sometimes when the wind is cool I shut my eyes and again we are lying in the grass in her front yard. I think it was in 1990, and it had to be at least October, because there were yellow leaves all around us, and her pale cheeks were red from the cold. We were so close I could feel the heat of her exhaled breath on my face. Only inches from each other’s lips, we are forever fixed in this position, like two, separate worlds, who are always on the verge of falling into the deepest parts of each other. Our bodies were nearly imperceptible, only faint brushstrokes, captured in once vibrant, now faded oils on the vast emptiness of an unfinished canvas, forever poised on the edge of fate’s crumbling precipice.

  “Ever wonder what you will look like when you’re older?” She asked.

  “Not really.”

  “I see myself as a tall woman who always wears dresses and high heels.”

  “You’re almost fifteen and you’re only five-foot-two, I don’t see you growing much more,” I said.

  “I mean, I know I won’t be tall, but it’s just how I see myself.”

  “I don’t suppose I see myself at all.”

  “Maybe it’s too scary,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You could be afraid of what you’ll see. I am,” she said.

  “Whatever you look like, I will still love you,” I said.

  She lay back in the grass. Her hair was long and straight and it spilled around her as if she were underwater. I didn’t tell her, but I could see even beyond all that. When she is old, and after everyone else is gone, I am with her. This is how I will remember her last years. The windows always open, even in winter. The high, coiffured ceilings added an operatic quality to her normally soft voice, and though most of the time nothing but meaningless intonations, her words were like lyrics to songs only she could hear. The way she drew pictures of herself in charcoal and hid them in drawers throughout the sunlit rooms, sometimes not finding them for years; and then shaking off the black dust like lost shadows as she fell apart piece by piece, her small hands always stained, pale and delicate as the dogwood petals that had whitened the trees overnight like summer snow. As we lay there, silently, both of us were imagining many futures, with or without the other, as the last golden days of Indian summer were slowly, and almost imperceptibly giving way to the late autumn chill that moved through my body like electricity, a feeling that often comes back to me on days like this.

  TIME-LAPSE

  She asked me if I was ever in love and I told her once, maybe twice. Did she love you back, she asked, and I said I’m sure she loved me, in some way, and she may still. But love may not have meant the same thing to her, as it did to me. All the important words are like that: death, happiness, and life. They have so many meanings, to so many different people, that it’s almost impossible to know just what they mean to any individual, at any given time—even what they mean to you, which often, can be the most difficult to define. Neither one of us could have known, that one day, years later, I would be telling this same story to someone else, about her. The face of a clock is a true representation of time, it goes round and round and everything comes back again. Instead of a steady line, our lives are nothing more than the same day over and over again. And it’s this cyclical nature of life that makes it so difficult to be happy. Even the beauty of a clear, blue sky can sometimes be heartbreaking, because every summer reminds me of that summer, and every time the leaves start turning colors in the autumn and you can smell firewood burning from some house nearby, or when the first rains of spring catch you off-guard, leaving your clothes and hair soaking wet, it is impossible not to remember all the other summers and springs, and all the old friends and lovers with whom you shared moments that will never go away; how they are still there—but they’re not. Today is the only thing that’s real; the only thing that matters. Yesterday, and tomorrow, are just the same lie with two different names. But we never seem to understand any of this, until it’s over. You never want to believe that this instant in your life will one day just be another story.

  THE FIRST LOVE LETTER

  As I chased you through the field where the grass was almost waist-high in places, and it was loud with the midsummer insects that were alive like an electrical pulse that permeated the humid air, I could feel it when it overcame me. The rumble of a distant thunderstorm echoed across the pastures, to the river, and all the way to the mountain, while Amethyst bursts of heat lightning lit up the darker purple sky. I caught up to you and we fell together in the grass and lay and waited on the rain.

  It’s hard to say anything about love that has not already been said. Though there are a million love stories, every one of them seems to be a little different. It’s like the same 8 notes in music replayed over and over, sometimes at different speeds, softer here and louder there, often transposed until it has been heard in every possible key, with every modal change available to even the most talented composers and manipulators of music. Maybe that’s the one the thing that separates true love, from just another crush; it is the one difference in a passionate encounter that stays with you throughout your whole life, and a simple, even vulgar one night stand. Whether or not you can make up a new song, instead of manipulating the songs of others. So I guess I am saying that my love is like a melody that I never heard before I fell in love with you. A simple melody, like birdsong, yet unforgettable as the voice of the one you truly love, singing you to sleep, night after long night.

  A SONG FOR YOU

  It was early April, and the hours of light had just begun to stretch out a little longer each evening, where it lay on the tips of the leaves, and they shimmered in the brisk, cool wind like sequins. Sitting cross-legged, Emma picked up her guitar, and strummed a few chords to see if it was in tune. She brushed her hair from her face, and began to sing.

  She had called me after school and asked me to come over. When I got there, we walked out toward the farthest pasture on the edge of her father’s property, until we found a place near the river, and
she spread out the old quilt. You could hear the water, and see the space in the trees where the river separated the fields, but the riverbank was hidden by the undergrowth, and the river itself was invisible. We talked for a while about school and how much she was looking forward to graduation and then she was going to spend the summer at her aunt’s house.

  She picked her guitar up from the grass.

  “So,” I asked, “are you going to play me a song?”

  She looked away and began to sing. As she sang, her quiet, yet passionate voice rose above the glowing fields, and then ascending further and further into the sky, as if it was some buoyant thing like a balloon, it was blown by the wind until it disappeared into the distance, settling in a place that seemed very far away. A place that seems to be moving even further away, with every new spring that passes.

  We stayed out there ‘til it was almost dark. I sat there, listening, in that last few minutes of golden light. It was a light that is beyond brilliant, as if in desperation the sun had quickly showered all of its beauty on our faces, scattering its last fiery rays across the fields and trees, so that night could not steal any of its majesty; so that none of its brilliance would be wasted.

  We lost touch after graduation, and for a reason I have never understood, she killed herself that fall. I didn’t find out until later, that the song she sang that day was about me. Her sister had found the lyrics in one of Emma’s diaries. She handed it to me and I held the yellowing notebook in my hands like a relic, and I read the words out loud. Though they were legible, printed neatly in that almost calligraphic script that I remember well, without her voice they made no sense, as if the words had been encrypted by time, the meaning irreversibly blurred by the years in between, and when she killed herself, she took the meaning with her, and I would never understand them.