This little story took a while to find a home, and it’s one I’m very fond of, so huge thanks to Reflex Fiction for long-listing it in the Spring 2020 competition.
Punctuation
Her abandoned paperbacks sulk in accusing piles, spilling their chapters onto bare floorboards. A few words cling defiantly to the well-thumbed pages, the rest relinquish their attachment to the paper.
He slumps on the sofa, ignoring the restless fiction. In the loveless dark inconsolable rivulets of Times New Roman trickle towards him, point by sullen point. They demand attention, yearning to be re-animated by a reader. Sometimes he runs his fingers through the streams, panning for happiness, letting misery drift by. When he closes his fists the brittle letters shatter. Black dust drifts, covering everything, like a fingerprint dusted crime scene.
Paragraphs decay, breaking into sentences, then phrases, to pool darkly against skirting boards and chair legs. He doesn’t notice the full stops, dots and commas rolling around, eventually settling into the indentations her red stilettos left in his newly stripped floor a lifetime of loss ago. The brackets and ampersands form a trail of curls drifting across the floor before they slip through gaps in the boards. As structure vanishes the words blur into a stream of unconsciousness.
When he drags himself off to his solitary insomnia, silverfish feast on book glue. Blank pages liberated from their spine slide into slippery traps for his bare feet. Woodlice cluster, gorging on the sheets until the pages resemble lace doilies. In the gloom the floor shimmers.
He ignores the threatening manila accumulating in the hall. There is no heat or light in the house, and the log basket contains nothing but woodlice and mouse droppings.
The cold drives him to burn her books. He rakes through the ash each night, hoping to find the vestiges of love, forever, happy, as the skeleton pages disintegrate.
Without the punctuation of her, he can make no sense of the world.
greygirlieandme 