Summary: A flash fiction about loss. Please mind the tags.
I closed the door behind me, hand lingering on the brass knob. It was ice cold and I thought of who might have opened this door before. A woman in a large fur coat with drifts of snow slowly melting around the collar. A man in overalls, hands caked in pond scum and wellies sloshing with murky water. Maybe mother, her expression as cold as the metal and the cross around her neck gleaming like the sun off of a glacier.
I shook out my hand. I expected pins and needles, but my hand wasn't frozen. It was a little warm even, the day heating up around me earlier than expected. Summer wasn't expected for three more weeks. I glanced behind me.
I would go back when I was ready. Sort it out then.
Only many things came between me and the front room. Painting the smallest bedroom and turning it into an office. Then, of course, deciding I preferred small spaces at night, small enough there could be no other visitors, and switching the primary suite into an office and the office into my primary.
And I needed to learn some accounting as that had never been my job before. So I signed up for an online class. Only I was never good at this remote work and I could hear creaking coming from the front of the house all the time as if something was testing its weight against the doors. I always checked out the front window and saw nobody on the sidewalk.
Should I have checked the front room? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But with only one car in the driveway - mine - was there any need to?
The car was the next thing. Twenty years old and six digits of adventure and a persistent smell of clementines that was beginning to fade. I'd kept it around for the smell so I figured it was time to get a new one. I had to pick up a few extra shifts then, put my accounting to good use, and then I had to search for the specific brand and make and model that would be entirely new and wouldn't make me think of clementines at all.
I said
After I go grocery shopping I'll go in. Or after I sell the tools in the garage, make a day of cleaning. I should also also waited for spring which seemed like a good seas--
By then it was nearly a year and I hadn't thought of the front room at all. It was there and I needed to sort it, I knew, but it wasn't going anywhere.
Then one day I was on the couch and a particular rerun came on that made me blind for a moment. I blinked and the familiar characters swam back into focus. My heart thrashed inside my coffin-like chest. The couch stretched beside me, empty. I fumbled for the remote on the coffee table. Only I got the grabbing part all wrong and I stood up instead, walking the twenty steps, and stopped in front of the door.
I had allowed it to become a wall by then. I understood this as I considered the chipping white paint and the dusty brass knob that appeared so cold it radiated a fog. My laters had turned into a never. The anticipation of sorting it was collapsing under the weight of my lie. I had never intended to open the front room again, really. Just promised and promised and promised.
Promising had never been my job either.
I turned and pressed my back against the door. The wood breathed against my spine. If I looked down ,there might be fingers poking through the crack at the bottom. Pond scum, ice flakes, the shattered remains of a cross lodged underneath the fingernails. My chest was no longer a coffin. It was an eggshell and I struggled not to breathe too deeply last I crack it all to pieces.
A gentle knock came from behind me. At head level. No, at waist level. I'd sat without realizing and now a tiny hand was knocking next to my ear.
A fit of rage flooded through me then as I clutched at the skin over my heart. It wasn't fair, it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair. I had closed the door to this room and stacked my tasks between me and it and let it become a wall and the occupants were still speaking to me, screaming to me, demanding to be known. I still knew it was a child knocking, little hand curled over fingernails painted plum, the same color of the bottle still sitting spilled under my bed even after I'd changed rooms. And the hand pressed against the door at the middle of my back was larger than mine, fingers long and thin and calloused, longing for the violin I kept in the second chair in my office as if tossed aside only for a moment.
I reached up to grasp the knob next to my head. I could feel those precious hands tense on the other side. Would they fight me if I twisted it open? Help me? Maybe if I didn't look directly I could do it. Maybe if I--
My chest would crack and the yolk of me would spill all out. I could see it like I could see them and I pressed my hands against my eyes, pushing my glasses up into my hairline where they caught and pulled. Moisture rolled down my cheeks, too much to be tears, and I gasped these little short gasps that tested my shell with impatient pressure. It would pass. It always did when I found the right trick to it. Let's see... The grocery shopping had been done on Tuesday and I always bought too much still, so I wouldn't need to go until next Tuesday. The new car ran beautifully. Was it low on gas? I could do that before work tomorrow. I could...
Knock.
I stood and the rage was cooled lava pooling behind my eyes. Fine. Fine. I faced the door. If my shattering was what this task needed, then let it be. If they need my organs, they could have them. I would give more and more and more if only to not have this wall between us still--
I opened the door ready. Ready to accept whatever those hands might fling at me, scum or glacial ice or shards of faith. Ready to give whatever they might want even if it meant my flesh underneath their nails or my eyes crushed beneath wet feet.
But an empty room has no needs. I stood trembling in the doorway and the paradox of knowing and unknowing fought behind my teeth. I had put my ghosts all in this room to sort out later, you see, but ghosts can't fill rooms. Only the living can.
A solid blow landed. Spiderwebbed cracks ran all the way up from gut to throat and caught under my jaw. The wound ached all down my neck and throbbed.
I closed the door with the gentleness required to avoid waking a baby. I had been quite good at it and so there was no protest as I twisted the knob back into place. My hand was ice cold. I brought it to my mouth with the idea of blowing the chill out of it and found my lips stretched open in a silent scream. I pressed my fingers over my maw and pretended it was a yawn.
See? How tired I am? I knew it wasn't time to sort things.
I went to my little room and laid down on the bed. The TV bubbled at me through the wall and, as I closed my eyes, I could just make out the two figures sitting on the green velvet couch, hand in hand.
The year my partner drowned, I bought a lobster — and set it free.
I was slumped over on the kitchen counter when my phone rang. It was my friend Rick. When I answered, he said, “There’s a New Year’s ritual I started awhile back. I go to the grocery store, buy a lobster, bring it to the beach, and set it free. I think of it as a second chance for the lobsters — and for me. I figure this might have some meaning for you.”
