FICTION

by Midge Raymond

She’s stand­ing in line at the reg­is­tra­tion table when she sees him, two writers ahead. Sun-spritzed brown hair, strong hands. A hint of crow’s feet indi­cat­ing he’s maybe fortysome­thing. No wedding ring. When he leans over the table to sign a form, she admires his pen, a Mont­blanc, shiny black with its sig­na­ture bloom of snow at the top.

When she arrived on campus that after­noon and crossed the lawn, she felt a sort of anticipation—maybe it was the lush green of late summer: the grass thick, the trees over­ripe with leaves, the sun’s flut­ter­ing shadows under­neath. She’s opti­mistic about the week ahead, in part thanks to last night’s yoga class, during which she finally managed to hold tree pose for more than a few seconds. When you can’t balance your body, you can’t balance your life, her instruc­tor says—and Rachel has been out of align­ment for a long time, wob­bling through her days on weak ankles, on shaky knees. But last night, stand­ing on one leg, arms raised high in the air, she felt as though that moment of steadi­ness was a sign her life was headed in the right direc­tion, for once. 

After she checks in, she gathers up her housing assign­ment, her key and name badge, the sched­ule of work­shops and read­ings and meals. As she looks around, she sees writers chat­ting with one another and sud­den­ly feels like the new girl in school who’s arrived midyear. She decides to go straight to her dorm room to fit in a few minutes of meditation.

As she’s heading for the door, head lowered to read the evening’s sched­ule, she feels the sudden jolt of col­lid­ing with another body, hears the clatter of an object hitting the floor and skit­ter­ing to a stop next to her san­daled foot. 

The Mont­blanc. 

She leans down to pick it up. The name Todd Bennett blooms in silver—or is it platinum?—across the cap.

She holds it out to him. “It’s beau­ti­ful,” she says. “I’ve always wanted one of these. Like it might make me feel like a real writer.”

“It hasn’t helped me yet,” he says with a laugh. 

“I’m a tech­ni­cal writer,” she offers. “I’m just getting started writing fiction.”

“Sounds famil­iar,” he says. “Twenty-two years in Silicon Valley, and now I’m writing a novel.”

That explains the suntan. “I miss Cal­i­for­nia,” she says. “I’m here in Port­land now, but I used to live in San Diego.”

 “I just got back from vis­it­ing there,” he says. “It’s gor­geous. Why’d you give it up for the north­west gray?”

“I left after the wild­fires,” she says. “I lost my house.” 

“Oh,” he says. “Wow, sorry to hear that.” He looks taken aback, and she feels bad for spring­ing it on him like that. Then his expres­sion changes, and he asks, “Your name’s not Rachel, by any chance?”

She pulls her name badge out of her pocket and holds it up. “That’s me,” she says.

“And you sub­mit­ted a piece about a fire?”

“That’s right.”

“We’re in the same workshop.”

Rachel feels herself straight­en­ing a bit, as if she’s remind­ing her body—or it’s remind­ing her—that she’s about to read­just her life. As if she can feel her ver­te­brae shift­ing along her spine, allow­ing every­thing to fall into place. 

 

*

 

In her room, she doesn’t bother with med­i­ta­tion. Instead, she takes out the stack of man­u­scripts for the workshop—seven of them, short stories and novel excerpts, which they were all sup­posed to read ahead of time so they’d arrive at the con­fer­ence ready to offer critique.

Todd’s piece had been one she’d skimmed and dis­missed, think­ing she’d come up with some­thing to say during the work­shop. But now she rereads it—a chapter from some sort of techno-thriller—and remem­bers her first reac­tion, which was to wonder how a guy writing genre fiction got accept­ed to a sup­pos­ed­ly lit­er­ary con­fer­ence. But now she’s looking closer, con­vinc­ing herself that his sen­tences have a certain energy, that his words leap off the page, ani­mat­ed in a way she doesn’t see as she pores over lit­er­ary mag­a­zines, study­ing all the ways in which she might improve her own writing. As her eyes move down the page, she tries to picture him writing these words, won­der­ing where and how he writes, whether it’s just before sunrise or in the dark quiet of the mid­night hours. 

Then she puts his pages down, shaking her head to clear him from her mind. She gets into the lotus posi­tion and breathes. 

She began yoga classes when her lone­li­ness began to feel like some­thing invad­ing her body—a shriv­el­ing sen­sa­tion, as if she were shrink­ing from the inside out. She’s been taking both yoga and med­i­ta­tion for a year, yet she still feels as though she isn’t doing it right. She’ll sit in the quiet studio lis­ten­ing to others’ breath­ing, won­der­ing if they are one with the uni­verse or whether they’re as con­scious of every passing moment as she is. 

She likes the idea of the flu­id­i­ty of time, and this is what keeps her coming back. In one class, they explored their past lives by light­ing candles and placing them six inches away, with a mirror another six inches away on the other side. During med­i­ta­tion, they were sup­posed to be able to see a past life reflect­ed in their own eyes. Yet all Rachel could see was the flicker of gold in the dark, muddy brown of her eyes—no story, no answers, just a ruti­lant shadow in a hollow space.

 

*

 

After Joel died, she started taking classes, some­times two or three at once, as a way to dis­tract herself. It hadn’t worked. She dropped out of ceram­ics because her vases were lop­sided. She took self-help classes—Mind­ful­ness & Self-Com­pas­sion, Living Well After Loss, The Foun­da­tion­al Role of the Body—and even those left her feeling like a failing student among straight‑A peers. Com­par­i­son is the root of all heartache, her ther­a­pist told her—but she still couldn’t help doing it. Her whole life had been based on com­par­i­son, on com­pe­ti­tion, and even though Joel wasn’t there any longer, she con­tin­ued to play the game, even if she was com­pet­ing with only herself.

 

*

 

At the welcome party, Rachel carries around a plastic cup of sick­en­ing­ly sweet chardon­nay as she wanders through the room. Her eyes come to rest on an auburn-haired woman with a rosy, antic­i­pa­to­ry flush in her fea­tures. It takes Rachel a moment to realize that the woman is sitting next to—and flirt­ing with—Todd. As Rachel makes her way over, she nudges her way through the crowd, jostling her cup of wine, spilling a few drops at Todd’s feet.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Hey,” he says, and smiles.

“I was just going for another glass of wine,” Rachel says. “Can I bring you guys anything?”

“I’ll go with you,” he says, and looks at the auburn-haired woman. “Merlot?”

The woman nods. 

As they wait at the bar, Rachel learns that Todd is staying in the same dor­mi­to­ry, his room a flight below hers. “Who’s your room­mate?” she asks.

“I don’t have one.”

“Lucky you.” 

Her own room­mate, Vivian, is a shy, serious writer who Rachel imag­ines will be asleep every night by ten o’clock—not one to sneak in before dawn wearing last night’s clothes, shoes damp with morning dew. 

Rachel thinks back to her days in college: squeez­ing into top bunks at frat houses, quick­ies in the library base­ment, the feel of ocean air on her skin through open windows. She didn’t rec­og­nize then—not until last year, in a seminar on embod­i­ment practices—that she was seeking con­nec­tion, seeking love, through these myriad phys­i­cal encoun­ters. Yet unlike many of her fellow seminar class­mates doing expe­ri­en­tial work, she didn’t see herself as a victim. She wasn’t. 

“I wouldn’t mind a room­mate,” Todd says. “This whole thing is kind of fun, like being back in college.”

“I was think­ing the same thing,” she says.

When they return to where they’d left the auburn-haired woman, she is no longer there. “We can’t let good merlot go to waste,” Todd says.

“I won’t even let bad merlot go to waste.” She takes a sip from the cup, antic­i­pat­ing tomorrow’s headache. She likes the way his eyes linger, the way his gaze sends a shiver up her mis­aligned spine. “So,” she says, “what did you think of my story?”

He studies her for a moment. “Pretty wild,” he says.

“Hmm,” she says. “I’m not sure how I should take that.”

“Either you have a hell of an imag­i­na­tion, or I should stay far away from you.” His lips turn upward, and she laughs. 

“So what did you think of mine?” he asks. 

She doesn’t tell him that she had to reread it, or that when she saw his words that second time she also saw his fingers on the key­board and imag­ined them against her skin. 

“You’ll find out in the work­shop,” she says, and takes another drink of the bad merlot. 

 

*

 

Rachel joins the five other writers in a circle, includ­ing the auburn-haired woman, whose name is Christi­na. The setup is not unlike her med­i­ta­tion group; here, though, the chair desk makes her feel awkward and vul­ner­a­ble. Julia, the instruc­tor, does an intro­duc­tion, gives them an exer­cise, and then starts the cri­tique. Rachel’s story is first in the lineup.

“‘Firestorm’ is about love and family and regret,” Julia begins, “and the first thing I’d like to focus on is the main char­ac­ter, on her credibility.”

Rachel muses on the word cred­i­bil­i­ty—a notion that comes up often as she writes. The story of Joel has been the story of her own life, too, but her ther­a­pist asks: How long do you want to own that nar­ra­tive? He men­tioned a word to her—chernopho­bia, the fear of joy—and sug­gest­ed that avoid­ing joy may be her way of keeping him alive.

 “The main character’s empti­ness really comes through in this piece,” Julia con­tin­ues. “But does she find redemp­tion here, when she moves to Port­land and starts over? Can she really start over, after what she did?”

“It’s believ­able to me,” Todd vol­un­teers. “Anyone can start over. At least, we like to think so.”

“I’m not sure this character’s redeemable,” says Christi­na. “To let her brother die in the fire like that?”

“I don’t see it as that black-and-white,” Todd says. “If she’d tried to rescue him, they may both have died. It was more self-preser­va­tion than selfishness—that’s how I read it.”

Julia breaks in. “What if the fire is a metaphor for some­thing else?”

A couple of murmurs hum through the room, and the group con­tin­ues to pick apart the story as Rachel pre­tends to take notes. The writer is not allowed to talk during the cri­tique session, and when they finish and take a break, Rachel pushes a strand of hair from the sweat on her forehead.

She sees Todd in the hall, at the vending machine. “Cri­tiques are tough,” he says. “Buy you a drink?” He smiles down at her as she accepts the cold can of iced tea. 

They step outside and stand under the shade of a large oak tree. “Thanks for being kind in there,” she says. “I’ve taken writing classes before but nothing quite like this. I didn’t realize how hard it would be.”

“Well, I meant what I said.”

She likes the way his eyes never leave hers. “We better get back,” she says. 

 

*

 

At that evening’s read­ings, Rachel sits alone, near the back of the theater. The podium is a work of art itself, carved into the shape of a bird’s wings, reach­ing up and outward. When writers stand behind it, with their hands on their pages, their arms dis­ap­pear behind the pale wood, and as they read they look like winged crea­tures them­selves, as if they are soaring. When Rachel closes her eyes, the dark sil­hou­ette that remains in her vision is that of a black angel against a gold background. 

The fiction writers wear skinny jeans and heels. The poets wear long skirts and hip eye­glass­es. They all seem to be dark-haired and smart, their hair pulled back in an artful dis­ar­ray, as if they can’t be both­ered with appear­ance. Rachel, in her loose jeans and Tevas, her high­light­ed blond hair falling around her shoul­ders, can’t help but wonder whether she’ll ever fit in. 

She listens without hearing, think­ing instead about the work­shop. When Todd’s story had come up for cri­tique, she’d returned his kind­ness, com­ment­ing favor­ably on the imme­di­a­cy of the lan­guage, the novelty of the genre. She could tell he appre­ci­at­ed it, but she felt like a fraud. And now she’s worried about the assign­ment Julia has given them: a short story of a thou­sand words, due on the penul­ti­mate day, to be cri­tiqued on the last. Rachel has no idea whether she’ll be able to write some­thing new in such a short time.

She takes a deep breath, won­der­ing whether she has any stories of her own anymore, whether she ever did. When she was growing up, her parents had limited resources, and these resources—money, love, attention—went to Joel, as they had to. It was simple math. Every­thing Rachel had went to him, too.

It began with a soccer injury, or so they thought. He began com­plain­ing of pain in his knee, which seemed to get worse at night and then became excru­ci­at­ing during prac­tice. It wasn’t until the knee began to swell that they went to see a doctor, who sug­gest­ed wrap­ping it and taking a few weeks off from soccer. Months later, they finally saw a spe­cial­ist, then another, and then came the diag­no­sis, a hideous-sound­ing word: osteosar­co­ma. It was rare, and serious, and required surgery and chemo and radi­a­tion. He was sixteen years old; Rachel was fourteen.

She did not know then that there were things in life you couldn’t prepare for, couldn’t over­come. By the time Joel’s cancer had spread to his lungs, by the time he had trouble breath­ing and spent weeks at a time in the hos­pi­tal hooked up to an O2 machine, she was spend­ing most of her time with him, watch­ing movies, playing the Mad Libs word games their mother had given them to pass the time. When they ran out of pre-printed stories, Rachel began making them up herself, with Joel filling in the blanks: stories about their parents, their dog; about the hos­pi­tal employ­ees; about the people they knew at school, who were already dis­ap­pear­ing from Joel’s world, and hers. She wrote about the glam­orous futures they would have, the story of him learn­ing to drive, the story of her going to senior prom. None of it hap­pened, and it wasn’t until she took a writing class in Port­land that she real­ized she’d been writing fiction all along—that the stories she and Joel told each other were truer than any­thing, and yet not real at all.

She knew the writers in the work­shop would find her fire story dis­turb­ing, even as fiction. Rachel begins to wonder whether the actual fire, as Julia sug­gest­ed, was a metaphor for some­thing else—a symbol of purifi­ca­tion, a signal to move on? 

That her family home actu­al­ly did burn down, along with dozens of others during that year’s fire season, told her more than any­thing that it was time to leave. She’d deferred college for a year, then another, until Joel was gone. By then she couldn’t imagine leaving her parents alone in their grief, so she lived at home while she attend­ed the local uni­ver­si­ty, where as a com­muter student she made only a few casual friends and didn’t have much of a social life. And when she grad­u­at­ed and looked for work, it felt easier still to look for local jobs and keep living at home.

When they got the Reverse 9–1‑1 call to evac­u­ate, they had an hour to leave the neigh­bor­hood, and Rachel took very little of her own belong­ings; like her parents, she took what­ev­er she could of Joel—clothes and books, laptop and phone, photos and baby books—all from his still-untouched bedroom. At the time, it felt wrong, somehow, almost as if they were steal­ing, but in the end Rachel was grate­ful for every­thing they’d taken with them. Even as they stood, two days later, at the burned-out shell of their home, all three of them were dry-eyed and calm. Rachel over­heard the fire marshal say some­thing about their being in shock, but she knew it wasn’t that. The loss of the house was nothing, really; they’d already lost everything.

At first, Rachel thought moving away would change her life. In Port­land, she’d rented a room in the Hawthorne dis­trict, in an old house filled with clocks that chimed every quarter hour. She didn’t sleep for three nights—it wasn’t just that she knew exactly how late it was, that she’d mem­o­rized the order of the clocks’ chiming, antic­i­pat­ing the sound of each one, the chimes longer as they stretched toward mid­night, then short again in the early hours—it was that, with each gong, she felt another piece of her own life disappearing.

She hardly notices that the reading is over until people rise from their seats and begin to shuffle out. She lingers behind, then finally goes outside, the campus dark and shadowy, the day’s warmth still hov­er­ing in the air.

She mean­ders along the curving paths, and it’s late by the time she makes her way back to the dorm, where she sees Todd sitting on the steps, talking to Christi­na. Christi­na is freckly and strik­ing­ly pretty, with a long, lean body that Rachel can picture wrapped around Todd’s like a pretzel. One look from Christi­na tells Rachel that she’s unwel­come, and for a moment Rachel is tempted to sit down, to slip off her shoes and stretch her legs, catlike and mean. But she remains stand­ing as she says hello, one foot on the step in front of her, ready to ascend. 

They chat briefly about the day’s work­shops, about how the air feels like rain. Then Rachel says, “I’ll see you later,” and starts up the stairs.

Todd says, “No, sit down, join us.” 

Rachel hes­i­tates. “All right,” she says to Todd, then adds, “if you’re sure you don’t mind.”

She sits down on the other side of Todd, and a few minutes later Christi­na gets to her feet. “I’ve still got some reading to do,” she says. “See you tomorrow.”

Rachel feels a twinge of guilt and tries to ignore it. A rain­drop hits the con­crete, and moments later, the skies open up. 

“I’ve got some wine upstairs,” Todd says. 

His room looks like any other dor­mi­to­ry on move-in day—blank-walled, institutional—though it bears small details of the man sleep­ing there: the bottle of syrah, the laptop, the half-open duffel bag. 

He pours wine into plastic cups, and they click them togeth­er with a dull, flat sound. They sit oppo­site each other on the twin beds and make small talk about the read­ings. Then Rachel swal­lows the last of her wine and stands up—but Todd waves her back down and gets up to refill their cups. This time, he sits next to her on the bed.

“I’m still think­ing about your story,” he says. “Tell me what inspired it.”

She takes another sip of wine. “The house burning to the ground, mostly,” she says.

“I know,” he says. “I meant, the other stuff.”

“It’s fiction,” she says.

“You remem­ber what Julia told us about Kurt Von­negut,” he says. “He said to write about what you care about, what you think other people should care about.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“I’m won­der­ing what you want us to care about.”

Rachel looks at him and wonders what would be dif­fer­ent if he knew. Maybe it wouldn’t matter at all. His eyes are still on hers, and then he leans forward, until his face is close.

She lets her lips meet his. He kisses her with a slight pause, a hes­i­ta­tion, before pulling her close. She takes his cup and puts it on the bedside table, along with hers, then folds her leg up on the bed so she can get closer. As their bodies ease back­ward, the bed­springs creak under them—weary, she imag­ines, from the dozens, if not hun­dreds or thou­sands, of lovers here in the dorms before them.

Their shirts are off, hands reach­ing for buttons and zippers, and then he buries his head in her shoul­der with a sigh. “We shouldn’t.”

“Why?”

As he seems to waver, on the verge of saying some­thing else, she reaches for him again, and nothing about him—nothing about this part of him, anyhow—hesitates this time. He draws in a sharp breath, and they shed the rest of their clothes. And what­ev­er he was about to say is forgotten. 

 

*

 

The next day in work­shop, Todd won’t look her in the eye. She tries to act as though he’s just another body in the room, and when the work­shop is over, she leaves without a back­ward glance. 

It reminds her of why she’d sworn off men recently—they never seem to under­stand that a night of sex doesn’t mean she wants to marry them—and why her rela­tion­ships have always been so short-lived. She’d made no time for boys in high school, and once in college and beyond she was drawn toward men who, like her, wanted nothing resem­bling com­mit­ment.  Yet still she sought some­thing, and this elusive some­thing showed up in the things she keeps in a closet in her apart­ment, a dark, cramped grave­yard of past rela­tion­ships, a jumble of random items: a lone golf club, the left half of three pairs of shoes, a fra­ter­ni­ty mug, a tennis racquet. She doesn’t know why she takes these things, only that it’s an instinct, a way of grasp­ing some­thing she can’t oth­er­wise hold onto. And for all their clutter, these objects seem to take up neg­a­tive space; they reveal an empti­ness her crowded closet belies.

She doesn’t see Todd again until later that night; he’s sitting alone at the evening read­ings. She takes the seat next to his. She stares straight ahead, feeling his head turn, his eyes on her face. She ignores him for most of the reading but even­tu­al­ly lets her foot, crossed over her leg, swing in his direc­tion and touch his knee. 

When the reading is over, he says, “Let’s take a walk.”

They begin walking, away from the crowds.

“I wanted to tell you this last night—” 

He stops, sighs. On the narrow paved paths of the campus, the voices behind them grow distant. 

“What is it?” she asks.

“Last night was amazing,” he says, “but—I’m married.” A pause, as if waiting for her reac­tion. “I’m sorry.” 

She feels her heart kick the inside of her rib cage, a sharp swift jolt as if to tell her she should have known. “Why don’t you wear a ring?” she finally asks. 

He looks down at his hand. “I lost it in the ocean a couple weeks ago. Down in San Diego.”

A cloak of dis­ap­point­ment envelops her body from the outside in, as if she’s the one under­wa­ter. Then she shrugs, a gesture that begins as an act but feels real by the time she speaks. She remem­bers a term Joel’s doctors had used after his surgery—pos­i­tive margins—meaning the areas where some of the cancer might be left behind, any cells they couldn’t find and remove, and she thinks of how little can be known until it’s too late to do any­thing about it. 

“It’s fine,” Rachel says. Then, reck­less­ly, she adds, “I’d have done it anyway. It was worth it.”

In a move so swift she doesn’t have time to react, he moves close and kisses her, a fever­ish kiss she rec­og­nizes, as if he’s reached the same place of care­less­ness she has. Hidden by thick summer foliage, they sink down into the dirt under one of the large firs, her hands unbuck­ling his belt, his reach­ing under her sundress.

After­ward, as they lie looking up at the night sky through the needles of the tree, she says, “Why are you still married?” 

“It’s not what you think. I love my wife.”

She lets out a short laugh. “That wouldn’t even hold up in a work­shop,” she says. “Too clichéd. Come on, tell me.”

After a long pause, he says, quietly, “Some­times the clichés are true, you know. You get busy with careers. With raising your daugh­ter. And then the kid leaves and there’s nothing between you anymore.”

She turns onto her side, prop­ping her head up, and looks at him. “Well,” she says, “now you’ve created quite a little plot twist for yourself.” 

He sits up, brush­ing the dirt and pine needles off his back. He stands but doesn’t offer his hand, and she doesn’t move to join him. She remains sitting under the tree as she watches him walk away.

 

*

 

She goes to the morning work­shop only so Todd won’t think she’s avoid­ing him. Again, he barely looks at her. She skips the after­noon ses­sions to write, deter­mined not only to finish her assign­ment but to make it into exactly what she wants. She writes all day, and by evening, her back is tired and aching. 

She skips the read­ings and spends the rest of the night in med­i­ta­tion, or what she’s come to think of as meditation—that sus­pen­sion of time in which she lets the stories come to her, in which she reworks them in her head until every­thing is as she wishes it could be, or could have been. Editing out her mis­takes, her broken family, her incip­i­ent rela­tion­ships. Backspac­ing over every­thing so she can outline a new life for herself, some­thing that might lead her, finally, to the sort of ending she’s always wanted. 

 

*

 

On the last day, they cri­tique two pieces before getting to hers. She feels oddly calm. 

“Rachel’s story, ‘Med­i­ta­tion for Writers,’ draws some inter­est­ing par­al­lels between med­i­ta­tion and writing,” Julia begins, “and, of course, it has a strong sense of the phys­i­cal. So what do you think the author is really trying to do here?” 

“What­ev­er it is, I feel like she’s trying too hard,” someone says.

“Yeah, the part where the guy tells her he’s married is a total cliché,” adds another. “And claim­ing he lost his wedding ring in the Pacific? I feel like the main char­ac­ter is too cunning to let him get away with that.”

“No, she’s gullible,” Christi­na says. “I think that’s the point—that she bought into it, and the guy felt guilty. That’s why he couldn’t perform that second time, under the trees. Because his lie was nagging at him.”

Rachel pre­tends to take notes in her journal, lifting her eyes to steal a glance at Todd as the others con­tin­ue talking about the story. He’s staring down at her pages, his face utterly still but oth­er­wise reveal­ing nothing. And in that moment she regrets what she’s done—or at least, the way in which she’s done it. You’re the only one who can control your own nar­ra­tive, her ther­a­pist says—yet for Rachel, this only feels true on the page.

“Ulti­mate­ly,” Julia says, as she begins to wrap up the cri­tique, “even though this story feels inau­then­tic at times, the writer clearly has a passion for the subject of sex and rela­tion­ships, and this can be chan­neled into more suc­cess­ful pieces.”

“It’s really well written,” one writer says, “but I don’t know what she’s trying to say.”Julia agrees. “I think the best thing the author can do,” she says, “is to accept where the story wants to go.”

 

*

 

Rachel heads down­stairs for the farewell recep­tion, pausing on the floor below when she glimpses Todd cross­ing the hall. He’s in jogging clothes, toi­letry kit in hand, and he shuts his door and heads toward the bath­room down the hall. He doesn’t see her. 

She tiptoes down the hall, and, when she hears the shower running, she tries his door. It’s unlocked. She steps inside and closes the door behind her. The room looks the same as it did the night she was here; nothing has changed.

She opens the drawer of the desk and lets her hand pass over his car keys, spare change, receipts. He hasn’t unpacked any­thing. She doesn’t know it at first, but as she rifles through his open duffel, she real­izes she’s looking for his wedding ring. Finally, at the bottom of one of the inner pockets, she finds it.

She holds it up—a thick, plain gold band—and, after study­ing it for a moment, she returns it to its hiding place. She turns to leave, then pauses by the desk. She picks up his pen, the Mont­blanc, and looks at his name, etched in the reflec­tive black resin. 

She opens the door. Down the hall, the shower has gone silent. She pockets the pen, then closes the door behind her, as if she’d never been there at all. 

###

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 17.

Photo by Siora Photography.