Extract of

Seeing Anyone?

© Tom J Vowler 2007

Winner of HappenStance Short Story Competition 2008

Today stretches out before me like some vast desert I don’t want to cross. The drive north to her house feels slow, somehow uphill, as if the car is subject to the earth’s curvature. Choosing what to listen to is impossible; there is no music for this, so the last hundred miles pass in silence.
            And then suddenly I’m there, pulling into an unfamiliar driveway, in front of a cottage I’d pictured differently, with a garden we’d once dreamt of together. I turn the engine off, exhale deeply and now that it’s too late, ask myself if I should have come. Then she’s standing there, smiling, as if I pop round each day. I pick up the envelope of photographs and the thirsty tiger lilies and step out.
            ‘Hey, you,’ Sarah says.
            ‘Hey.’
            We hug clumsily. I wait for the musk of Chanel to hit me, but it doesn’t.
            ‘You look well,’ I say. ‘Must be the country air.’
            ‘You, too. Come on, come in.’
            Following her inside, I’m unable to resist a glance at a finger on her left hand, which I see is bare.
Some of the furniture is familiar. A radio offers benign jazz that’s barely audible. Smells compete for my attention: pungent ash from a recent fire, vinegary pickles and chutney waft in from the kitchen, and the thick sweet scent of the oak beams, strewn throughout, the grain full of secrets and memories.
‘Here, let me put those in some water.’
            ‘Wasn’t sure what to bring…’
            ‘They’re beautiful. She’s in the garden, under the tree. Coffee?’
            The tree is a crab apple, offering mottled shade. Curled up beneath it, on a worn tartan blanket, is Millie. I’ve not seen her for three years. She hears me coming and tries to bark a warning but is too weak. Then she recognises me, by my smell or face or voice, I’m not sure, and her tail beats slowly against the ground. She tries to get up but I hurry to her. I can’t believe how old she looks. Much of her coat is grey and matted; her legs are like knotted sticks, her face gaunt. I stroke her head and she lifts it into my hand. As I move my face nearer her, there’s a smell I can’t quite place – fetid and otherworldly, like death.

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