I asked her why she had never said goodbye when she left, why she kept coming back, but would never stay with me.
She didn’t reply, she just looked at me with those big brown eyes, the sorrow glistening in them.
She said I was better off without her.
I left then, just got up and walked away with the pram, remembering at the last moment to throw down some money on the table to pay for my tea and scone. She trailed after me, shouted after me, but it was easier just to walk on, to smile down at my son and calm him after his fright.
We got strange stares from passersby, but they were easier to ignore than she was.
I was angry because now she had turned up again, I knew I wasn’t giving my whole heart to my wife and son.
I was thirty-five, and I was torn in two.
Eventually I had to stop, I was just too tired to keep up the pace I had set, and I collapsed on to a bench. I was at entirely the opposite end of the promenade from our hotel, so it was going to be a long walk back.
She sat down next to me, and held my hand as I cried. I cried for what could have been, for what was and for what was going to be. I was stuck in a job I hated for the sake of my family, and she had just reminded me that I could have had so much more.
She kept popping up over the next couple of days, thankfully never approaching when I was with my wife, because I had no idea how to introduce her.
The only other time she spoke to me was late one night, when I had gone to the pub for a drink, and was making my slow way back to the hotel. We were to leave the next morning, and whilst I told myself that I just wanted to make the most of the sea air, I knew in my heart I was just hoping to see her again.
She was dressed as she always was, in that brown woollen dress, barefoot despite the wet left from the evening’s rain.
She was wary now, apparently scared to come too close after my outburst a few days before. We just stood looking at each other for the longest moment. Eventually, although I had no idea where it came from, I had the courage to step closer. I took her in my arms beneath the full moon, and we stood there until we were both cold though.
I was thirty-five, and that was the first time I had held her in my arms.
~*~
I was forty-two, and I was burying my wife.
We stood on the hill overlooking the sea, the grave gaping open at our feet, my son’s face buried in my thigh. My trousers were soaked through with his tears. The sun shone down on us, and up on us, reflected in the surf. It was mocking us.
It had been sudden, a car accident whilst on the way to pick our son up from school, and a night in the hospital on the best machinery they could muster, but it wasn’t enough. The doctor said her brain had shut down to try and repair the damage, but from what they could tell, it wouldn’t be a battle she could win.
She looked so small lying in the hospital bed.
The lad had become withdrawn in the days since we had received the phone call, telling us she had left us, not speaking a word to me and grudgingly eating his meals. He would hide away in his room, and didn’t know I had overheard him talking to his teddy bear, telling Alfie how much he missed his mummy already.
I was forty-two, and my world had been shattered.
Naturally, that’s when she chose to appear.
I just stared in the beginning, not sure I was really seeing her, almost wishing that the sun was just playing tricks on my eyes and casting images into the spray. I blinked, hard, trying to clear my vision. She was there.
I looked down at my son, hand on his shoulder, and managed to pry him off of my leg. He looked up at me from under his sandy fringe, green eyes swimming with tears, and sniffed. I did my best to smile for him, and nodded down the hill to where the rest of the family were milling about the gates, comparing their grief before heading to their cars. I told the lad to go and catch his aunt, and get her to get him some squash and a sandwich when they got to the social club where the wake was being held.
He clung to my trousers, wanting to know why I wouldn’t go with him. I looked up at her, wordless, and then he looked up too. He looked right through her, I could tell by his continued pleas. I didn’t know what to tell him. Thoughts rushed around my head, and I had to fight to calm them.
Eventually I told him I wanted to say a last goodbye to mummy, alone, and he sniffed again, but nodded. I watched him stumble down the hill, looking tiny in his formal black coat, and then turned back to look at her.
She hadn’t aged a day since we were twenty-one, and that almost hurt more than the fact she had chosen today of all days to show up.
She held out her hand, and led me away from the grave, to the low wall that marked the boundary of the graveyard. It also marked the cliff, the sea churning against the rocks a dizzying drop below as we sat down.
I was forty-two, and I suddenly felt seven all over again.
She told me she was sorry for my loss, and I thanked her for the thought. The wind whipped her hair around her face, hiding her eyes from me. I don’t know why, but that was even more unsettling than seeing them.
I could lose myself in them when I could see them.
From I don’t know where, she pulled out a little box, a plain brown box, and held it out to me. I took it as though it was electrocuted, belatedly realising, as I teased it open, that this was the first time I had noticed her own anything other than her brown dress.
The box contained a small patch of fur, the same brown as her dress, curled like her hair, and damp with sea spray. I felt my brow furrow as I looked at it, my mind seeming to run despite me grief.
She told me if I accepted it, she would stay with me forever. I just stared at it for a long moment, my head a foggy mess.
I stood up, and hurled it into the sea.
I was forty-two, and I had just had my heartbroken for the last time.
~*~
I was fifty-six, and I was dying.
It had started as a migraine the summer before, instilling in me a weakness that left me scared. It had taken several days lying in a dark room to recover. The lad had been home from university, working for the summer, and his eyes said it all when he found me, collapsed on the kitchen floor that afternoon.
As soon as I could move about again he insisted I visit the doctor. So we went, and spent the morning sitting in a waiting room full of coughing, whispered concern, crying babes and stifling heat. The lad couldn’t sit still, shifting in his seat as though his backside were on fire, and running back and forth to the reception desk, asking constantly how much longer until we’re seen, don’t you know my Da is ill?
I was fifty-six, and not for the first time in my life, I was scared.
The doctor, when we eventually saw him, was exhausted. A nasty bout of summer ‘flu, he said, the surgery had been backlogged all week, all the staff having to work extra hours to deal with the demand. And then he smiled, a wan smile but a smile none the less, and asked how he could help.
As I had expected, he said it was just a migraine, and whilst it was more unusual for them to come on at my age, it wasn’t unheard of. I just had to rest, and take painkillers as soon as I felt a headache coming on, just in case. The lad opened his mouth to protest, cranky beyond belief after the morning we’d had, but I caught hold of his arm, squeezing it, and thanked the doctor for his time.
The lad nearly burst my eardrums in the car home, and brought on another headache. He stormed out of the house, the door rattling in the doorframe after him, and I have no idea if he came home that night.
The next time it happened I was at the wheel of the car.
I woke up in a bed in Accident and Emergency, the harsh light biting into my vision the moment I opened my eyes. I screwed them shut, and felt something squeeze my hand, hard. Blinking to clear my vision, I opened my eyes again to see it was the lad, eyes red in his pale face, knuckles white as he clung on to me. I shook him off, massaging my hand to get the feeling back, and he managed a weak laugh.
And t
hen the doctor came in.
I was fifty-six, and I was given a death sentence.
Inoperable brain tumour, a year at most to live.
So now here I lay, after a major seizure, hospital bound by doctor’s orders, to live out the last few days of my life in perpetual boredom. The pain came and went, and I slept around it, regardless if it were day or night. The lad came and went too, around his classes and homework. I was almost glad when he left; I couldn’t stand the almost constant tears.
The pain woke me one night, a stabbing above my left eye, into a world lit only by the full moon from outside the window, and the blinking of the heart monitor I was attached to.
She was there.
She still hadn’t aged, was perfect at the age of twenty-one. She smiled, silent tears streaking down her cheeks, and told me she was sorry to hear the news. I asked how she had gotten in, past the staff, and she said they had taken her to be my son’s twin sister. She said even if they hadn’t, she would have found a way.
I asked what she wanted, and she leant forward, kissing me on the temple.
I was fifty-six, and for the first time in my life I admitted to myself that she was the woman I loved over everything else. I smiled, a tight smile against sudden hot pain, glad I was able to see her one last time.
My vision faded amidst the flatline beep of the heart monitor. The last thing I remember was the scent of the sea, an oddly sad scent.
I was fifty-six, and my time was up.
~*~
Lor Graham is a fidget. A proper fidget, so she splits her time between reading, writing, knitting, crocheting, baking, playing all manner of brass instruments or studying guitar, doing really badly at video games and feeding her twitter addiction. Most of her time is spent with pen in hand, however.
She knows more than is likely healthy about Pirates, despite being one of those dirty hippies that never wears shoes, is a Japanese graduate currently learning Italian and talks entirely too much. She is also entirely Scottish.
(Her first published short story, Islands to Auld Reekie, was published in the Pandemonium Press collection 1853.)
~*~
The Last King
Liz Colter
A sudden spring rain pattered on the leaves above Anna’s head, causing her to look up from the tangle of roots criss-crossing the woodland path. The rain didn’t seem able to penetrate the thick foliage. She decided to go on a bit farther as the walk was clearing the clutter in her head that her boss, her job and her lemon of a car always managed to engender.
Already she had gone deeper into the woods than ever before; past the sunlit birch and oak and into the heavy, dark trees near what must be the center of this grove. Her rotten sense of direction and perpetual fear of getting lost yammered at her, but it felt good to push the boundaries of her comfort zone. She had carefully counted every branch since leaving the main trail—three forks, always to the right.
Besides, if this helped rebuild some of the self-confidence Sam had stripped from her, then it was all for the good. Hard to believe it had been three months since she had moved from Chicago to England to escape her psycho boyfriend—long past time to rediscover the person she used to be.
Anna distracted herself from thoughts of getting hopelessly lost by recalling the story her landlady had told her; a local myth about a fay king and his trooping fairies that came to this woods once every hundred years. With the rain on the leaves sounding like tiny feet, Anna could almost picture wee-folk running through the tree tops, playing in the foliage, and watching her from behind the large boles.
Turning to note the landmarks behind her, she realized the woods were getting darker. Probably from the rain, she thought. Unless the sun was setting. She wasn’t wearing a watch and had walked farther than she planned. Resisting the urge to panic, she did a quick calculation and told herself it couldn’t possibly be sunset yet.
She had only gone a few feet farther when she heard a sound like soft whispers beneath the rain. Turning first one way and then the other, she stared between the thick trunks. From the corner of her eye, she thought she glimpsed movement in the shadows. Gooseflesh pricked her arms and made the fine hairs of her neck stand on end.
“Quit it!” she said as firmly as she could, trying to convince herself that nothing was there, but the eerie feeling continued to grow.
The creepiness won out over her desire to prove her confidence, and she suddenly very much wanted out of these woods. Forcing herself not to hurry, she turned and started back. The little feet playing in the treetops abruptly became thousands of feet, drumming a loud tattoo on the leaves. Big wet drops found their way through the canopy.
Anna began to trot, stifling nerves that told her to run full out. She came to a fork she didn’t remember. Veering left, she continued to jog, pulling up short when she reached a dead end of thick, thorny gorse.
“Oh, crap! Calm, Anna, just be calm.” Her heart beat in great, heavy thumps and she tried not to hyperventilate. “Think, God damn it!”
She turned and hurried back the way she had come, scanning for the fork again. The trail narrowed without branching until it was no more than an animal track. Anna stopped, staring at the dark trunks, like sentinels all around her, crowding her to stillness. Her body was stationary but her heart kept running, beating a hard, fast rhythm against her ribs. She had no idea what direction might lead her home.
“Are you looking for something?” a voice said.
Anna jumped so hard her shoulders jerked and a choked noise popped out of her mouth. She whirled. A man stood just a few feet away. Adrenaline coursed through her body, making her lightheaded, but the man remained perfectly still. Anna’s heart and breath limped back into sustainable rhythms. As she calmed, she became aware just how beautiful he was. Not handsome. Beautiful. So beautiful that she couldn’t stop staring.
He was of medium height, with a face and body like a work of art. His skin was pale, even for England in March, but radiant with health, and she guessed him to be about her age, late twenties. He wore a light jerkin and breeches with soft, high boots, all in shades of brown. She knew that should seem odd, but his clothes fit him as naturally as bark fit a tree. He wore his black hair longer than current fashion, and even in this poor light she could see the blue of his eyes. Her landlady had warned her that Gypsies sometimes camped in these woods, and she wondered if he was one of them.
Anna realized she hadn’t answered him, but she couldn’t seem to pull away from those eyes—deeper than sky blue, brighter than bluebells. Heat rose in her face and she forced herself to say something, anything. “I… I was walking by myself. I got scared, and when I turned around I got lost. I was trying to find my way back.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Where had that little regurgitation of facts come from? She was pretty sure her Women’s Self Defense class in Chicago would have advised against telling a strange man in the middle of the woods that you were alone and lost and scared. “Um, what I mean is, I missed my turnoff back there.”
He smiled. She wouldn’t have believed he could be more handsome until she saw that smile. She tried to collect herself but her thoughts were becoming less and less coherent. Physical attraction had always been her downfall—the first catalyst in each of her disastrous relationships—but this was more. Much more. She felt like a twig in a strong current.
He crossed the distance between them, coming so close she could feel the heat radiate from his body. His skin had a sweet, clean scent. Her breath quickened. She wanted him to touch her. She could imagine it as clearly as if it was happening; sliding his fingers under her hair, his strong hands cupping her head. His mouth moving to hers. His warm breath on her face just before his tongue slid past her lips.
She blinked. He was watching her with those fathomless blue eyes, he hadn’t moved, hadn’t lifted a hand to her. What was happening? Why couldn’t she think straight?
“Come. Walk with me,” he said.
He extended his elbow and she slipped h
er arm through his without hesitation. His skin below the short-sleeved jerkin was so warm it felt fevered. Touching his flesh sparked a sensual reaction, like an electric shock that ran from her arm down her body, leaving a residual pulse lingering in her groin.
He took them deeper into the woods. One part of Anna craved his physical touch so much she felt she would do anything for it but a deeper, quieter part of her was terrified. Images of the two of them together, naked bodies twined, kept flitting through her mind. The little pocket of fear suppressed deeper with every step.
Anna had always been pretty enough to interest men, but she felt plain and dull next to him. He moved so gracefully that she felt clumsy. She should have worried about where he was taking her, but instead she worried that he might not be as attracted to her as she was to him.
“Let me show you a favorite place of mine,” he said. Anna thought she heard a Scottish brogue in his soft voice.
She would never be appealing to him if she stayed mute. “You know these woods well.” Her voice croaked, ugly and harsh compared to his.
“Every root and branch,” he replied. “Though Andredsweald is a poor fragment now of what it once was.”
Andredsweald? Her landlady called this Glover’s Wood. Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered except being with him.
He brought her to a small clearing, surrounded by trees so huge that three men together wouldn’t be able to encircle one of their trunks. Their long, leafy arms reached across to one another, touching in the middle like dancers in a reel.
“It’s wonderful,” she said.
Green grass grew within the circle, making a soft mattress, and he helped her down. He lay on his side next to her, propped on one elbow with his head cradled in his hand, those blue eyes looking right into her soul. He asked her name.
“Annabelle Jane Clayton,” she blurted out, wanting him to know everything about her.
“Annabelle,” he rolled the name on his tongue, making it elegant where she had always thought it old fashioned and silly sounding. “I am Tamlane.” He looked expectant. The name meant nothing to her and she worried that it would disappoint him.
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