Rock Paper Scissors

by Alice Feeney

My husband doesn’t cheat on me with other women, or men, he has love affairs with their words.

A converted chapel seemed romantic at first. Quirky and fun. But now that we’re here, it does feel a bit like the opening of our own horror film.

All people are addicts, and all addicts desire the same thing: an escape from reality.

It’s harder to hide the darker side real you from someone you live with,

I haven’t been completely honest with him about this weekend away. I haven’t been completely honest about a lot of things, and sometimes I think he knows.

What he doesn’t know is that if things don’t go according to plan, only one of us will be going home.

What I should feel is guilt, but I don’t.

There is a side of my wife which nobody else sees, because she is so good at hiding it. Just because Amelia works for an animal charity, it doesn’t make her a saint. It doesn’t mean she’s never done anything bad, quite the opposite.

I never thought I was the kind of man who would cheat on his wife. But I did. And somehow, she found out.

Two wrongs sometimes make an ugly.

And I wasn’t the only one who slept with someone they shouldn’t have. So did Saint Amelia.

The visitors won’t be able to leave when they want to either. Not that they know that yet. It’s impossible not to feel a tiny bit sorry for them.

It felt as if you’d already known I was pregnant. You believed in me, even when I wasn’t able to believe in myself.

I have never been completely honest with my wife, but that’s for her own good.

The visitors would want to get out too if they knew the truth about where they were staying, but people see what they want to see.

‘How many raffle tickets did you buy?’ I ask, already dreading the answer. ‘Only one.’

Sometimes the early bird eats too many worms and dies.

‘What are you talking about, Adam? Who owns this property?’ ‘Henry Winter.’

That isn’t all. There is a red leather collar sitting on top of it. Amelia picks it up and I see Bob’s name on the tag, as though there had been any doubt in my mind that it belonged to him.

HENRY WINTER FATHER OF ONE, AUTHOR OF MANY. 1937–2018

It looks like the back wheel has been slashed as well. It’s the same with the other two. Someone really doesn’t want us to leave.

If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.

I never liked him. Or his books. And everything I’ve seen this weekend suggests that you’re the reason we’re trapped here.’

Maybe all marriages have secrets, and maybe the only way to stay married is to keep them.

Henry Winter didn’t just write about monsters. He was one.

So Robin never wrote a word of fiction again. Until Henry was dead.

People tend to think that the second wife is a bitch and the first is a victim, but that isn’t always true.

The first thing I want you to know is that I never stopped loving you, even when I didn’t like you, even when I hated you so much I wished you were dead.

My father didn’t just write dark and disturbing books, he was a dark and dangerous man in real life.

Henry’s books were his children, and I was nothing more than an unwanted distraction. He called me ‘the unhappy accident’ on more than one occasion – normally when he’d had too much wine – even wrote it in a birthday card once.

Rock Paper Scissors is a story about a couple who have been married for ten years. Every anniversary they exchange traditional gifts – paper, copper, tin – and each year the wife writes her husband a letter that she never lets him read. A secret record of their marriage, warts and all. By their tenth anniversary, their relationship is in trouble. Sometimes a weekend away can be just what a couple needs to get them back on track, but things aren’t what or who they seem. Sound familiar?

The car they caught her in was the car that killed your mother. The only witness – you – couldn’t pick her out in a police line-up, because you couldn’t recognise the face of who was driving. But she knew you.

Your wife was to blame for your mother’s death when you were a child, and I think it’s only right that you know that, before making a decision.

Did you ever wonder why she does that? I’m sure she said it was to try and help you remember the face of who killed your mother, but maybe it was to make sure you never did? It’s no wonder she needs pills to help her sleep at night, the guilt she must feel would keep anyone awake.

Option three – SCISSORS: You don’t want to know option three.

A second marriage was the ransom I should never have paid.

That ring should never have been on Amelia’s hand.

‘Did it crash into a woman wearing a red kimono while walking her dog? Did you leave her for dead and drive away?’ ‘Adam, I—’ ‘Did you think you’d get away with it forever?’

But then another face appears behind my wife, and I see another flash of metal, and this time it’s a pair of extremely sharp-looking scissors.

They were almost all I had left to remember her by, and they looked good as new once they’d been in the dishwasher made the experience extra special for me.

I kept one pair and deliberately left the other set behind at Blackwater Chapel, because it’s time to move on, and some things are best left in the past.

Those scissors marked the end of an unpleasant woman chapter in our lives, and today they helped to reveal our new f...

Nobody needs to know that Henry Winter was my father. Or that he is dead. Or what happened to your second wife.

I took the corner too fast and we started to spin. When I looked up, I saw my mother. And she saw me.

Do I feel bad about what happened to Amelia? No.

The newest one, which stood out from its crumbling neighbours in the distance, and couldn’t have been more than a year or two old, grabbed his attention.

There was no marker, no name, and it reminded him of a pauper’s grave. But then he noticed something sticking out of the ground… an old inhaler.

HENRY WINTER FATHER KILLER OF ONE, AUTHOR OF MANY. 1937–2018

When he did, he saw that the box contained three items. A sapphire ring, a paper crane, and a small pair of vintage scissors, designed to look like a stork. It was the ring that caught his eye, not just because of the sparkling blue rock, but because it was still attached to what appeared to be a human finger.