Edward Ashton's Blog, page 2

Aaaaaaand I’m back.

Following the tragic demise of Curious Fictions, I’m bouncing my blog back to here. Check back for updates on MICKEY7, my progress in turning big pieces of wood into smaller pieces of wood, and more.

The Overcast : Overcast 86: Backup by Edward Ashton

The Overcast : Overcast 86: Backup by Edward Ashton:

One of my favorite children is up on The Overcast today. It’s got philosophy, rock climbing, stabbing, and the fantastic narration of J.S. Arquin. Give it a listen if you have a few minutes to kill.

Listen

Listen.

They lined us up then, along the edge of the pit. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering
because they had taken our coats. We stood silent, heads bowed, staring down into the freshly
turned earth. We breathed in the crisp winter air, and waited.

                                                      

They called us together, to the center of the town. They called us from loudspeakers mounted to the tops of their trucks, told us that if we came to the square, they would give us the
mercy of bullets, but that if we fled, it would be fire. A few of us ran. They were true to their
word. By ones and twos, and then all together, we came.

                                                      

It was done for holiness. They told us that much. It was God’s inscrutable will, a solemn duty, to be undertaken with sorrow rather than joy. They told us this as they killed us, but the
grins on their faces betrayed them. And we asked ourselves: would we have done the same to
them, if we could have? If chance or fate or Providence had placed the whip in our hands, would we have cut them down in their thousands, then millions? Would we have murdered their
children and burned their homes, taken their lands and their lives and their names, tried to
pretend that they never had been? We told ourselves we would not have, that our rule would have
been kind and our justice fair.

We told ourselves this, and it may even once have been true. But in the dark of the night
now, we know that it is far too late for justice. We have lost too much. If we could murder them
all, we would do it.

Listen.

I come from the north, from the cold, windy shore of a great, frozen lake. Ours was one
of the last towns to fall to the UnAltered. We had seen the news, knew what they had done as
they spread like a brush fire up from the south. We should have fled, should have crossed the
border into what remained of Canada. We should have never come back. But there was a base
nearby, and a loyal General. The UnAltered were a rabble, my father said, the products of
random inbreeding and inferior genes. The army would hold. And hold they did, along the
northern bank of the river, for a week, and then two. Every day, though, more soldiers crossed
over. The General was killed in his bed, and what remained of the army melted away.

I was eleven then, and Altered, but not to the eye. A bit taller, a bit stronger than I should
have been, and never once sick in my life, but I could have passed. My sister, though—sixteen
years old, with white-blonde hair and porcelain skin, clear blue eyes, and features symmetrical to
the micrometer. My father thought to disguise her, to dye her hair a mousy, uneven brown, blotch her skin with makeup, dress her in shapeless smocks. It didn’t matter. Our neighbors denounced
us on the very day that the UnAltered crossed the river.

Twenty years on, and I still dream of that day. From my hiding place in the attic, I hear
the shouted summons from the yard, then bare moments later the crash of the front door
shattering. I hear my mother’s short, sharp scream, and the bark of the rifles.

They failed to find me that day, but in my dreams I feel the heavy tread of their boots on
the stairs, hear the low rumble of their voices as they pace through the attic, looking for me. I
crouch in the black space behind the knee wall, trying and failing to stifle my sobs. Finally they
stumble on the hidden door, and I wake up screaming as a hard, calloused hand grasps my ankle
and drags me, writhing like a maggot, out into the light.

Listen.

We are few now, and scattered, but we are not gone.

We bear a mark, each of us, a stamp on our genes, put there by the Engineers who changed us. It is this that allowed the UnAltered to hound us, even after all the ones with visible
changes—the ones like my sister—were long dead. The scanners are everywhere, in airports and
schools and hospitals, and when the mark betrays us, we are killed, even now.

It is this mark that will save us.

A Destroyer is coming, like the tenth plague to the Egyptians, carefully prepared in our
last secret places. It will spread through the air and the water, through birds and rats and insects.
It will find the UnAltered wherever they hide, taking their first born, and also their last. Taking
their wives and their mothers, their daughters and sons. Taking all.

The mark on our genes will be lamb’s blood on our lintel. The Destroyer will pass us by. 

Listen.

Spring has come to the mountains now, and the long winding road to the valley is clear.
The net has been silent for almost a month.

The wide world is empty.

The wide world is new.

It is time, I think, to see what it has to offer.

Photo

Dust

You’re peeling back your inner gloves, aching in every muscle after a twelve hour shift, when you feel a faint pressure against the inside of your left wrist where the thick latex is doubled over. You barely have time to register the sensation before it disappears with a soft pop, and a cloud of tiny motes appears around your hand, sparkling in the harsh white lights of the decontamination room. Your heart lurches and you yank your hand back, but it’s a spastic movement, directed by your terrified lizard-brain rather than the part of you that thinks, and those few centimeters of exposed skin at your wrist pass through the cloud before you stagger backward, cradling your arm to your chest. You look down to see a thin dusting of gray specks on your skin, then feel a brief, almost-painful tingling as they disappear, leaving behind an angry-looking scattering of tiny red bumps.

You stare at the pattern of spots, frozen, until they begin to form red constellations against your sweat-grimed skin. The burner is less than two meters away. Will charring up to the elbow be enough? You try to think back to your training, but your mind is a howling void. Has it been ten seconds yet? Twenty? How long does it take the nanos to worm their way into an artery? You should probably go all the way to the shoulder now, but you still haven’t moved. You’ve seen what the burner does to an arm or a leg before, and a tiny voice inside your head is whispering that all you need to do is wait. Just a few more seconds now, and there won’t be any point. You won’t have to do it at all.

A voice speaks in your ear now, a loud voice, caught half-way between boredom and alarm. It’s the duty officer, asking if there’s something wrong. He can see you standing there staring at your wrist, of course, but he must have missed the spore pod bursting under the pressure of your folded-over glove, must have missed the spreading cloud of dust.

Not his fault, really. You missed it too. The pods are everywhere out there by now, encysted, clinging to the walls of buildings, to the interiors of abandoned cars, to the cans of food and bottles of water you were sent out to scavenge. You think back, try to remember when your outer glove might have gotten pulled back just a centimeter or two, when a gap might have opened up that let the pod sneak in between the protective layers, in where the bath of solvents that doused you before you were allowed in the first lock couldn’t find it.

“Hey,” the duty officer says. “Seriously, is there a problem? Do we need to run a second-pass decontamination?”

You look up at the camera mounted above the inner door. Second pass decontamination. A polite way of asking whether you’d like to be incinerated.

“No,” you say finally. “No, I’m fine. I thought I saw something, but I’m… good. I’m good.”

Your voice is shaking, and you’re sure that his hand is hovering over what you imagine as a giant red button on his control panel. You close your eyes and wait for the flames.

“Well hurry up,” he says finally. “We’ve got three more waiting to come in.”

You open your eyes, nod without speaking, and slowly finish peeling off your gloves. They go into the burner, as does the latex-lined jumpsuit you wore under your hazmat gear. The smell of your damp, clammy skin is unbearable. You think of a story you read once, years ago, in the world before the dust, about a man being forced to dig his own grave. You didn’t understand it then–thought it was ridiculous, in fact. Why would he do it? Refuse, and die now. Agree, and die an hour later. You understand now, though. You’re a walking corpse, far more surely than the man in the story, and the grave that you’re digging is not only your own. You know this, just as you know that the flames would give you a far quicker, cleaner death than the dust will.

You know these things, but your lizard-brain doesn’t, and it’s been in full control since the moment you saw that cloud of dust coalescing around your hand. All it knows is that death is final, and that no price is too high to pay for another hour, another minute, another second. All it knows is not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

Would it make a difference if you had a family? A wife, or a husband? A beautiful, pig-tailed daughter, waiting for you inside? You remember stories of fathers charging into burning buildings, of mothers offering up their bodies to shield their children from hails of bullets. Maybe. There were other stories, though, probably more true, of mothers and fathers selling their daughters’ bodies to buy another day’s bread. Who’s to say what kind of parent you’d have been, if the dust hadn’t come?

You hear a dull thumping now, coming from the outer lock. There are three others outside, waiting their turns. Will the dust you’ve left behind find them? Doesn’t matter. The nanos inside of you are multiplying already, converting your bones and blood and organs into copies of themselves. In a few hours you’ll bloom, and that will be that.

Naked now, you walk slowly to the inner door. You close your eyes, take a deep breath in, and let it back out. Is that a twinge already? Can’t be. The pain shouldn’t start for an hour or more. You lift the cover from the keypad, and punch in the first three digits of your access code. You hesitate over the final digit. Your hand is shaking. You hit clear, lower the cover, and take another deep breath. And then, as if from a great distance, you hear the words: I’m infected. It takes a long moment for you to realize that they’ve come from you.

The duty officer is shouting, but you can barely hear him now over the roaring in your ears and the hissing of the snapped-open fuel vents. You close your eyes again, and as the droplets of aerosolized gasoline settle onto your skin, you think back to a day years ago, before the dust. You were nineteen then, standing on the knife-edge peak of a place called the Dragon’s Tooth. The sun was high and hot in a cloudless blue sky, and the green farmland of the Shenandoah Valley was laid out below you like a salt map, six hundred meters down. The shadow of a hawk passed over you. You looked up, squinting into the sun, as he circled around and called to you. You feel the warmth of the sun on your face, and for a moment, just at the end, you can almost believe that you’re there again. The hawk dips lower. You reach out to touch him. The sun in your eyes is blinding, as the world flashes white.

My God, the Fans

A guest post by Auston Habershaw, author of the just-released Dead But Once, as well as many other awesome things. 

Like a lot of mid-list authors, I dream of the day I’ll hit it big. Lines of fans at my book signings. Book tours. Movie deals. The words “best-selling author” preceding my name. Action figures based off my characters. Fan art. Video game tie-ins. The whole Star Wars/Harry Potter/Game of Thrones experience.

But maybe I’m not thinking this through.

I mean, did you see how some fans reacted to The Last Jedi? They were howling for blood! I mean, I liked the movie, personally—a bit poorly paced and awkwardly plotted, sure, but still very enjoyable. And, like, there’s no requirement that anybody has to like a movie. But this was more than “not liking.” There were people out there accusing Rian Johnson of ruining their childhood. They wanted the movie expunged from the record! They were screaming and howling and carrying on and circulating petitions, as though Johnson had done them some kind of personal disservice.

I gotta say, it kinda freaked me out. Maybe hordes of devoted fans was something of a double-edged sword. I mean, I’ve always known rabid fans existed, but I didn’t really think they were in such numbers that they could actively harm or harass creators. But then, I guess I got my rabid fandom out of the way through my teenage years, a bit before the internet could really reach the likes of George Lucas, and I’m showing my age.

Still, I was taken aback. At some point, the big franchises like Marvel and Star Wars stopped being the province of their creators and, instead, are now beholden to legions of superfans on some level. I mean, you try a little gimmick like have Captain America working for Hydra all along, and the world freaks out. Granted, I did think that was stupid, but I wasn’t going to stalk the writer on Twitter or accost them at conventions. They’re telling a story—they’re entitled to do so. If I don’t think it sounds cool, then I won’t partake. Simple, right?

I guess not so simple. I guess maybe I’ve been naïve about what success in the entertainment industry means, whether it be movies, comics, tv, or books. I see my stories as my own, for better or for worse. There are a select group of individuals whose input I seek when I’m writing (my agent, my editors, my beta readers), but ultimately I’m going to tell the story I want to tell. People are welcome to like it or not like it, but I don’t think they get a say in what I do. You can’t crowd-source storytelling like that without rendering it limp and lifeless.

Of course, I’m not going to sit here and say “no thank you” to a huge fanbase. Of course not! I want people to love what I write! I want people to be inspired by my stories! I guess, though, I need to realize that with such popularity comes something else—something political and complicated and sometimes unpleasant. And anyway, this is not my problem anyway—I don’t have those legions of fans objecting to my latest move. I should be so lucky, right?

And maybe there’s some kind of middle ground. A place where creators can create and fans can comment and everybody can remain civil. Or maybe not—maybe the kind of fervor that leads to a franchise like Star Wars precludes the rational. This is lizard-brain stuff—showing Luke Skywalker like The Last Jedi did was a challenge to people’s essential world-view which, against all odds, was in some way based off a fictional hero created by George Lucas in the late 70s. It’s not just a story for them; it’s something religious. I guess that’s what weirds me out about it all: I want people to buy my books, but I don’t want to be their prophet.

But I guess, in the end, you don’t get a choice. Some select number of us authors are anointed, by Fate or Providence, to be so keyed into the Zeitgeist that our works become inspirational for decades to come. That’s a heavy responsibility, it seems. I like to think I am equal to facing that challenge, should it occur, but who knows?

I guess it would qualify as one of those good problems to have.  

Curious Fictions: Featured Stories

Curious Fictions: Featured Stories:

So one of my favorite children, “Tessa,” is featured at Curious Fictions this week. Give it a peek if you have a chance.

Tell Me

“Tell me how the world ends,” Ani says.

Michael shakes his head.

“Some things,” he says, “it’s better not to know.”

They sit across from one another, at a table in the back of a dimly-lit bar. His hands are wrapped around a half-empty bottle of Belgian beer. She lifts a martini glass, sips delicately at a drink that’s more fruit juice than liquor.

“You think you know everything,” Ani says.

Michael shrugs. It’s a statement of fact, not an accusation. They’ve only just met, but this much at least is already clear.

“I’m dying,” Ani says. “Did you know that?”

Michael hesitates for a moment, then nods. He looks up from his bottle and into her eyes. Ani doesn’t look like a dying person. Her skin is smooth and pale white, with a dusting of freckles across her nose and her cheeks. Her hair is long and full and red streaked with blonde, flowing over her shoulders in a billowing wave. The only hints at her mortality are a slight gauntness in her face, and a faint tremor in her fingers as they rest on her glass.

“Do you know what will kill me?” Ani asks.

Michael nods again, and takes a long pull at his beer. Lank brown hair frames his broad tanned face, and the week’s worth of stubble on his cheeks and his chin.

“I do,” he says, “but I’m not going to tell you.”

Ani laughs.

“I already know,” she says.

“No,” Michael says. “You don’t.”

Her eyebrows knit in annoyance.

“I do,” she says, “but you obviously don’t. You’re trying to be mysterious. It’s not working.”

Michael smiles, spins his bottle like a top, then catches it before it falls.

“I know you have malignant melanoma,” he says. “I know you’ve been told it’s in your liver and your lungs. I also know it’s in your brain, in your right temporal lobe. And I know that your doctor hasn’t told you that yet.”

Ani’s jaw sags open. Michael finishes his beer, waves a waitress over, and orders another. He orders a second drink for Ani as well, though her glass is still half-full.

“But…” she says.

“Right,” he says. “I know you’ve got cancer. You know you’ve got cancer. You think that’s what’s going to kill you, but it’s not.”

Ani scowls.

“It is,” she says. “My oncologist says it’s not curable. He wants me to do chemo anyway, says it could give me an extra few months, but…” Ani touches her hair absently with one hand, then shakes her head.

“I know,” Michael says. “You made the right decision.”

He leans his chair back on two legs, balances for a moment, then drops it back down with a bang. A song begins playing on the jukebox at the front of the bar. Ani smiles at the first few notes, then looks down at the table and blinks away a tear. Michael raises one eyebrow in question.

“My father used to sing this to me,” she says. “When I was little, and I couldn’t sleep, he’d come into my room, sit by my bedside and sing. I think this was the only song he knew.”

“It wasn’t,” Michael says. “It was just the only one that didn’t have the word ‘fuck’ in it.”

Ani laughs.

“You’re probably right,” she says. She slides her hand forward until their fingertips touch. “I still love it, though.”

“So do I,” Michael says. He pulls his hand away. “My father never sang this to me, but my first girlfriend did once.”

The waitress comes by with their drinks. Michael hands her a twenty, smiles, and refuses the change.

“She was dying too,” Michael says. “My girlfriend, I mean. It was a summer thing. She was gone before Christmas.”

“What from?” Ani asks.

“Brain tumor. She was sixteen.”

They drink together in silence until the song ends.

“So,” Ani says. “Are you going to tell me?”

Michael looks up, wipes at his eyes with one hand, and finishes his second beer in one long, bitter pull.

“Tell you what?”

Ani rolls her eyes.

“What’s going to kill me.”

“No,” Michael says. “I told you. Some things, it’s better not to know.”

Ani tries to meet his eyes, but Michael’s gaze slides away.

“Did you tell her?” Ani asks.

Michael closes his eyes, and bows his head until his forehead nearly touches the lip of his bottle.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Ani says. She looks around. The bar is nearly empty.  “Tell me how the world ends.”

Michael raises his head, and looks down at his hands. They lie on the table, palms up, fingers half-curled. His nails are short and ragged, bitten almost to the quick.

“You’re right,” he says. “It doesn’t much matter.”

The song on the jukebox now is a saccharine dance mix that nobody’s father or girlfriend would ever sing to them. As it spins down, a light flares through the window at the front of the bar. It grows brighter and brighter, until the whiteness seems to seep through the ceiling and the walls. Ani looks down. Her bones are dark tendrils in her glowing white hands.

“You see?” Michael says.

Ani closes her eyes.

“Tell me…”

In the Dog Park

“Hey,” Max says. “Got some bad news. We’re shutting down.”

I stare at him, slack-jawed. His tongue lolls out, and his tail gives a vigorous wag.

“I hate to harsh your day,” he says, “but I thought you might want a few minutes to settle accounts.”

I glance around. We’re alone in the dog park off Barker Road. The sun is high and hot in a deep blue sky, and a soft June breeze is pushing the leaves around on the gnarled old oak that stands between us and the parking lot. A drool-soaked tennis ball sits in the grass, right where Max dropped it.

Right before he started talking.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re gonna need to…”

Max drops to his haunches and grins up at me.

“Gotcha,” he says. “Background. This?” He makes a sweeping gesture with one paw. “It’s a simulation.”

I look around again. Definitely nobody watching.

“A simulation?”

“Yeah. You know what a simulation is, right?”

I nod. I’m not sure I do, but I don’t want to look stupid in front of my dog.

“Good,” he says, “because you’re in one. It’s been running for most of a year now. Going really well, honestly, but we’re out of money. I thought I might be able to get an extension based on some of the data we’ve collected on ecosystem collapse. Ran it all the way up to the Section Head, but… well, long story short, he wasn’t impressed. So, like I said, we’re shutting down. Sorry.”

I sit down in the grass and pull my knees to my chest. Max comes over to me, pushes his nose under my hand, then settles down against me as I scratch behind his ears.

“But…” I say.

He closes his eyes. His tail beats a steady rhythm against the grass.

“What’s it all about?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, what are you saying? That none of this is real?”

He sighs.

“Come on, Doug. What’s real? You think, therefore you are, right? That’s as real as any of us can be sure of. Look, there’s probably a chance that my level of reality is actually somebody else’s simulation. Worrying about whether you’re at the top of the tree or not just isn’t productive.”

A bird leaps into the air from the top of the oak. It beats its wings as it climbs, spirals once around, then pixelates and disappears. When I look down again, the tree itself is losing resolution.

“So,” I say. “What do I do now? Should I be praying or something?”

Max opens his eyes long enough to roll them at me, then closes them again.

“If you want to, I guess. I should tell you, though, that I didn’t put any gods into this run. Theistic simulations generally don’t give you much useful data. Hard to learn anything about the migratory patterns of emus when you’ve got pillars of fire and whatnot running around all over the place.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess it would be.”

The breeze is picking up now, pushing my hair back from my face and ruffling the thick fur along Max’s spine. I look up. A fat white cloud scuds across the sky, straight overhead. As I watch, it freezes in place, then breaks into a fractal pattern of smaller and smaller clouds before disappearing.

“I don’t think…”

The sun blinks out, leaving behind a jet-black sky filled with bright white stars. Then one by one, they begin to disappear as well.

“By the way,” Max says, “if you’re wondering whether I’ve been laughing at you behind your back since you got me home from the shelter, the answer is no. Max was just your simulated dog until five simulated minutes ago. I went back and forth between talking dog and burning bush when I decided to give you a heads-up on this. I figured you’d take it better from the dog. Did I make the right call?”

He lifts his chin. I rub my knuckles along the underside of his jaw.

“Sure,” I say. “I mean, I guess so. I think I’m taking it pretty well, don’t you?”

“Oh yeah,” he says. “Definitely. Versions of me are laying this on every sentient in the sim right now. Half of them are running around in circles, clucking like chickens and smearing food all over their bodies. You’re doing great.”

The last few stars wink out, and we’re left in a dark so black that I might as well be blind. The wind dies down. Max noses my hand again.

“Hey,” he says. “Who said you could stop scratching?”

“Sorry.”

I start in on the back of his neck. He sighs a long, satisfied dog sigh, and I suddenly realize that I can’t feel the grass anymore. It’s just me now, and Max, and a silent black nothing.

“So this is it, right?” I say. “Nothing left to go but me?”

“Actually,” Max says, “you should already be gone by now. So should I, for that matter. What’s up with that?”

“Well,” I say. “Have you considered that maybe you and your simulation were all actually just a part of a bigger simulation that I was running? Maybe this whole scene was just my way of seeing how you’d react to your simulation shutting down.”

“You’re shitting me.”

I laugh.

“Yeah,” I say. “I am. I have no idea what’s going on.”

Max presses against me. His fur is soft and warm, and I can feel his breath on the bare skin of my leg. We float together in companionable silence, in a world without form, and void.

After an unknowable time, a light appears in the distance.

It flickers and grows as we watch.

“Huh,” Max says. “I wonder…”

I can see that there’s something below us now, the vaguest hint of a dark, roiling vastness. I look up.

By ones and twos, then all at once, the stars reappear.

###

Shari

Shari rolls off of me, wipes a drop of sweat from my forehead and says, “Sometimes I feel like I could melt right through you.”

I nod, breathe deep and close my eyes.

“Really,” she says. “Don’t you feel that right now? I feel like we’re almost the same person.”

She leans across and kisses me. Her hair on my shoulder is sticky and damp. Outside the window the snow’s really coming down now, piling up on the flower box and pattering against the glass. Shari lays her head on my chest. I can feel myself drifting. I dream a sound like an animal scratching at the windowpane. Shari’s weight presses down on my heart.

Shari’s gone when I wake up in the morning. Out in the kitchen there are dishes in the sink, and a note taped to the refrigerator that says she’ll be working late. Shari’s a lawyer with the Public Defender’s Office. She works late a lot. I take out a bowl and milk and Fruit Loops, and settle down in my arm chair for the morning cartoons. Boomerang is showing a Roadrunner marathon. I watch as the coyote tries to crush the roadrunner with a giant boulder, then gets hit by a train coming out of a painted black hole.

I know how he feels. I have a dream where I’m down on my knees in a long, black tunnel, hands behind my head, hearing the whistle and watching that huge white light come on.

Shari thinks dreams like that mean I’m creative. She thinks I’m writing a novel.

Early evening: I walk into the bedroom to find Shari sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes on the floor, a yellowed scrap of paper in her hand. She palms it when she sees me, gets to her feet and tries to walk out.

“What is that?” I say. “What are you reading?”

“Nothing,” she says.

“Come on, Shari. I saw you.”

She hesitates, then scowls and hands me a torn-out square of newsprint.

“GUARANTEED PRAYER,” it says. “Repeat this prayer nine times each day for nine days. On the ninth day, you will see results.”

“What were you praying for?”

“What do I always pray for?”

She snatches back the paper and pushes me aside.

Shari prays nightly for her mother to outlive her.

There’s a park across the street from our apartment—a nice park, with swings and a river and rental canoes, not the kind that turns into a crack bazaar at sunset. I spend hours there, wandering through knee-deep snow, sitting on half-buried benches, watching people with children and people with dogs. In the course of a week I build a half-dozen snowmen, but none of them comes out quite right.

Shari comes home early to find me just sitting down at my desk. My cheeks are still flushed with cold, and my fingers on the keyboard are too stiff to type.

Our fourth anniversary: I take eighty-five dollars from our checking account. I buy her a sweater, and take her to a Vietnamese restaurant called Dr. No’s.

“This is beautiful,” she says when I give her the sweater, but I can see she’s disappointed.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Nothing. I just… I had this idea that maybe you might give me the manuscript tonight.”

“It’s not ready,” I say. “I never show anyone my first drafts.”

She looks away.

“I’m not just anyone.”

I scoot my chair around the table until we’re side-by-side. Her eyes are distant, focused somewhere behind me. I wrap my arms around her, pull her head down to my shoulder and say, “I want it to be perfect.” She stiffens. I pull her closer, clinging like a drowning man, until she lets go of the sweater and hugs me back.

“It’s all right,” she says finally. “Whenever you’re ready.”

A letter comes from Shari’s mother. It’s three and a half pages long, but the gist of it is, “Come home to me. I’m dying.”

Shari goes. Her phone calls trail off after a month or so. After two unanswered emails, I copy my manuscript onto a thumb drive. I walk to the Kinkos by the park, print it and bind it, and send it to Shari.  It comes back a week later with a two word note: Too late.

A season passes, six months, a year, until finally she mails me the divorce papers. I sign them.

That summer, she sends me one last message before dropping off the edge of my life.

“Thomas,” it says. “Believe it or not, I find myself missing you. Mother is gone. At the end she’d forgotten the years since the wedding, and she asked constantly why I was here and not home with you. It took me a while to come up with an answer, but in the end I told her that our marriage just never felt real to me. You pretended to be an artist and I pretended to believe you, and we both pretended we were in love with each other, because that’s what we thought we were supposed to do.

“Last night I woke up shivering, my window wide open to a cold, clear sky. I’d been dreaming about the first time we shared a bed, how the moonlight gleamed in the frost on the window and your arm fell across my shoulder, and we both lay there with our eyes closed and tried to fall asleep. I really thought I loved you then. If you want to remember something, remember that.”

The trees in the park are nearly bare again now, and the pathways are covered in red and brown leaves. I see a woman there sometimes who looks a bit like Shari, lying on her back on a rock by the river, staring up into the clouds.

Maybe today I’ll talk to her. I’ll ask her what she’s looking for. I’ll offer her my hand.