Rock Paper Scissors

by Alice Feeney

It feels like I am sitting next to a stranger, not my wife. The stench of regret diffuses through the car like a cheap air freshener, and it’s impossible not to know how unhappy we both are.

I wonder if all writers are egomaniacs with low self-esteem? Or is it just you?

just run away if things don’t go according to their plans.

After what she has already seen and heard, Robin is fairly sure that at least one of them will never leave this place again.

She invited them here after all, even if they don’t realize it yet. They will soon enough.

She knows what happened to the visitors’ dog because she took him. But Robin doesn’t feel guilty about that at all, even though she used to own a dog herself, and knows how upset they must be. Bad people deserve the bad things that happen to them.

WHAT IS HAPPENING

She was a bit like a rainbow: beautiful, captivating, colorful, and gone from our lives almost as soon as she appeared in them.

There are three hundred and fifty-four steps to the Statue of Liberty’s crown. I silently counted the reasons why we were still together as I climbed them.

I tried to make friends, and I succeeded for a while, but I was always on the outer solar system of those childhood relationships. Like a smaller, quieter planet, distantly orbiting the brighter, more beautiful, and popular ones.

I hate don’t like you right now, but I still love you.

Few people are genuinely capable of forgiveness, and nobody ever really forgets. Sometimes you just know a person is bad news as soon as you meet them, because they’re rotten, inside and out, and instinct tells you to stay away.

But our secrets have a habit of finding us, and everything she tried to run away from caught up with her eventually. Covering her present with the dust of her past.

And, unlike all the other headstones, this one looks relatively new. That isn’t all. There is a red leather collar sitting on top of it.

I stop talking when I see it for myself. It won’t be a problem to find the hole because it’s the size of a fist. There is a smile-shaped gash in the rubber: the tire has clearly been slashed.

She knew him well enough to know that he wanted to live—and write—forever. But all the money in the world cannot buy more time.

I don’t know what made me want things to be different, but my hand formed a new shape. To my surprise, yours did too.

He opens another drawer and holds up an antique-looking iron key. The next is filled with copper pennies. There must be over a hundred of them, each one with holes for eyes and a carved smiley face.

This is so scary im crying

I must not tell tales. I must not tell tales. I must not tell tales.

You told me that when you won a weekend here, the email said we could only come this weekend. Is that right?” I ask. She shrugs. “Yes. But why? What’s so special about this weekend?” “I don’t know. What’s the date?” Amelia checks her phone. “Saturday the … twenty-ninth of February. It’s a leap year, I hadn’t even noticed. Does that mean something?” “Yes,” I say. “It’s our wedding anniversary.” She looks confused. “We got married in September—” “Not ours. It’s the date I married Robin.”

Henry Winter didn’t just write about monsters. He was one. He made her write lines as punishment for writing that story at school: I must not tell tales I must not tell tales. I must not tell tales. So Robin never wrote a word of fiction again. Until Henry was dead.