Here's a thought

Plot

It it still raining as he trudges back to the garden bed.

How like a movie, he thinks. He’d always assumed that writers put those sorts of clichés into films because they had no original ideas, or were trying to distract from holes in the story. But maybe they weren’t just tired tropes. Maybe it does always rain at times like these.

But no one would watch this movie. He sets his jaw and resumes digging.

The mud is going everywhere. Water seeps into his boots. He feels the wet splatters of dirt on his jeans, and pictures a scowl on her face for his muddy footprints on the carpet in the back room. But she doesn’t care anymore.

This damn rain. Everything is heavier in the rain...

He starts imagining an alternate Tuesday, where the clouds simply remained grey and sullen, instead of bursting into tears.

No. Focus. Hurry up. This is the Tuesday he has. And there’s no time to daydream; the rain is harder now. The soggy walls of the trench are slumping into the rainwater pooling at the bottom. He needs to hurry, and he needs to remember the measurements. He keeps digging.

She’d be insulted if he got the measurements wrong. He laughs out loud at the absurdity of the thought.

The job is finished. As he plants the spade in the dirt, and walks back towards the house, he vaguely recalls a line he read in a book once. Something about honest men not needing a good memory.

That would be nice, he thinks.

He glances back at the hole he has dug. If he’s calculated right, her body will fit in there perfectly.

Muse

He slumps against the keys. The dissonant clash would wake him, except that he is utterly spent.

His tired mind can’t even be bothered conjuring up a backdrop for his dream. He only knows that he is dreaming, and there is just inky black space. Not a very good dream, then.

Not that she ever needs a backdrop. She never has asetting, not really. She stands apart from her surroundings like she inhabits a different space. She walks towards him, and the inky blackness is forgot.

The way she moves – sauntering, not stepping – and her scent, and the colour of her dress are all wrong. He knows that she never really looks like this. And when she smiles her sad smile at him, with eyebrows raised in bemusement and a far-off look in her eyes, he still imagines her lips to be pinker than they are.

She steps nearer conspirationally, and whispers to him. And though her lips brush against his ear, he hears the words echoed from an immeasurable distance.


“Stop trying to write me.”

He wakes up with a terrible headache, and tries a different chord.

The First Story

She’d never heard of him before. He said that he was getting “kind of big” on the music scene, and and that she’d probably know his stuff if she heard it.

She nodded politely that she probably would, and smiled at him the way she smiled at waiters who brought her food. She hated to pretend.

He reminded her of a cat she used to have when she was little. She remembered it trying to curl up and sleep on her lap, and the feel of its arching backbone as she shoved it away. They would repeat this little game until the cat gave up. But once in a while she would give in, just to keep things interesting. Funny how she couldn’t remember its name.

She couldn’t remember his name either. He was still talking to her, his hands waving wildly as he spoke, painting pictures only he could see. He was so involved in his own words that she needn’t have wasted her encouraging nods and murmurs.

He looked as though he practiced this story in front of the mirror. How many people had he told it to, she wondered.

Justin? Was it Justin? Or Jerome? Something with a J. He was looking intently at her now. With a start she realised he had asked her a question.

She tried a ‘no,’ which must have been close enough; he looked confused for a second, but took a breath and continued. She felt herself drifting away again. It was exhausting to lie, or pretend she was something she wasn’t. Like ‘interested,’ for example.

“Rufus!” she blurted out suddenly. The cat had been called Rufus. She hadn’t had it for very long. It had died during a heat wave one summer when she was 11.

“What?” he asked, his hands frozen mid-wave.

She didn’t bother to explain. She had remembered the cat’s name, and she smiled to herself as she walked over to the bar for a third coffee.

Two weeks later, his song came on the radio, and she never even knew.