Odd Couple
By narcissa
- 897 reads
/He would often lie back on the double bed, underneath the turning
crystals of the mobile, and think of her\
They had always been an odd couple, a strange match. Not just because
of how beautiful she had been (of course, now that wasn't an issue...of
course, he thought) but because of their backgrounds, their upbringing;
the simple difference in the way they had eaten a piece of toast, or
held a cup of tea.
/With his head between the cushions, he lifted his hand and tried to
remember the way her fingers had fitted around the mug\
He had been silent, she, bubbly and vivacious. He was a chemist, she a
writer, and a musician, self-appointed, and when she sang he had had
tears in his heart. Always. Of course nothing like the flood that had
settled now.
The day they met? /He smiled to himself, clenching his fingers into a
fist\ The first time he saw her was on the cover of someone else's
book, but that was long before he saw her in person. That had been in
the library, as well. He had stumbled into the wrong section again:
"Fiction" in bold letters on the end of the bookcase. It wasn't a
mistake, he had told himself (and still did), it was a coincidence. As
she had turned to face him he had sone an almost animated double take.
Maybe she had fallen from between the pages?
And when she kissed him (which, after the first time, had been
continuously) she tasted of sunlight and sea.
/Turning over to press his face into the pillow, he recalled the shine
of her fingernails. She always used to wear loud nail polish, although
in all their years together he had never managed to catch her changing
the colour. When they had dressed her, he hadn't been there to stop
them removing the neon pink, and it had made him cry to see her
fingertips so devoid of colour for the first time\
Months had passed, and even though he was aware of the time, every
morning when he awoke it would seem like that day: only for a second it
would be the summer morning of her official death-day. She had wanted
to be cremated, and sprinkled over a hill of poppies, but there wasn't
one (although he searched for days), and anyway he was never sure if
she was being serious.
He wondered whether they could ever be classed as an 'odd couple'
again. 'Odd couple', past tense now, and it stung him.
In her coffin, in white (she never wore white, always green or orange
or pink, but they said that wasn't suitable, like her nails), everyone
had said she looked asleep, but he couldn't see it. It wasn't his wife,
they had put the wrong woman into the earth, and Emily was still
upstairs, dead in the sheets beside him. In this way, he reckoned, it
would always be the same. It was not her live spirit sleeping quietly
next to him: his bed-mate was her sweet corpse.
/He always reprimanded himself for being so morbid\
That, however, would certainly make an odd couple- a man and his dead
wife. That sort of couple could not converse, could not even whisper.
Still, that was what it felt like. He wished her memory could seem more
alive, at least.
/It was quiet in the house, he had stopped all the clocks. It was at
times like these he would often lie back on the double bed next to her
invisible body, underneath the turning crystals of the mobile, and
think of how difficult it was to keep breathing in the silence.\
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