Melange Magazine

Fiction

TELLING

What are you doing here anyway? Aimee asks when she finally finds her voice. She can’t carry the silence between them anymore; it weighs too much. The low, almost imperceptible hum of the fluorescent lights overhead vibrates through her head.

I should ask you the same question. Dave smiles easily, showing his teeth. He looks down at his cup of tepid vending-machine coffee, twisting it carefully in his hands, staring intently at the gently sloshing surface. Are you visiting someone, perhaps?

The languid nonchalance in his voice makes Aimee sit up straighter. Her face feels taut. The draught flowing in from the corridor is too cold, boring up her nostrils as she inhales. She looks scornfully at the mute flickering of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ on the television overhead.

Everyone’s in here sometimes, Aimee says curtly. Especially at our age. And if you fucking think you’ll see your future in that, you’re wrong. It’s tea leaves you’re supposed to stare at. Aimee’s words hang in the air, savage and decapitated, but she looks unflinchingly at Dave, wanting to see the shock and hurt register on his face. Quiet Aimee. Gentle Aimee. Patient Aimee, where have you gone? Instead she notices, suddenly, where the crows feet have crept, insidiously weathering the corners of clear eyes meeting her gaze.

Oh Davie, Aimee repents. You’re here visiting her? It’s not really a question. What Aimee means is, Is there anything else wrong? Not with Alana, but with you?

I’m sorry, Dave says sadly, leaning back against the chair, closing his eyes so he can’t see but hears the click of Aimee’s heels down the corridor. But are you visiting her to, is what he wants to ask.

STRENGTH

Alana is dying.
Slowly. Dying.
Dying. Slowly.

Dave slouches, weary, at the foot of her bed with his hands buried deep in his pockets, searching for warmth. He watches the shuddering rise and fall of her flat chest. Each week, Dave sees Alana and thinks about his own mortality. He should be grateful he doesn’t have a defined length of time to live; he’s not the one with the poor diagnosis. But the feeling is like looking earnestly into a polished spoon, seeing one’s face warped and distorted, but recognising the eyes. Six months in this state, the specialist said. Then you’re looking at fifteen years as a vegetable. Maybe twenty if we’re lucky.

Whose luck, Dave demands of the walls. Mine? Aimee’s?

Honestly, David, Dave hears the Alana alive in his mind sneer. Your voice makes you sound weak.

But I’m not, I’m not. If I was I would have left you a long time ago. I wouldn’t have withdrawn the divorce papers. I would have married Aimee, if she would’ve had me, and to hell with what people would say about the affair.

BEFORE

Before Alana existed to Aimee, it was Aimee and Dave.

To Aimee, Dave is Davie. Davie who isn’t afraid to laugh heartily, Davie who believes and believes wrongly that he can eat cold slippery noodles of day-old Chinese takeaways with chopsticks, Davie who pretends to deny that he has to use orthopedic insoles, which really shows Aimee how comfortable he is with his flat feet. Aimee wants to laugh every time she thinks of the first time Dave told her, and each time she thinks of Dave, she has the image of him as a little boy, a bit on the short side, stoic faced and struggling bravely to push in those stiffly molded, drab beige, plastic pieces and lace up as fast as everyone else.

Now Aimee is cursing at the recalcitrant tram driver, blowing hard onto her hands and rubbing them.

Why don’t they stop for us, are we supposed to flag them down like a bloody taxi?

It doesn’t bother me, Dave shrugs.

You with your gammy leg too, Aimee teases.

Hey, walking a lot is good for me, Dave says. When I was young and we had to fill out all those stupid forms…

What forms?

Anything that asked what my hobby was. I always wrote walking, and no one could get it. They tried to explain to me what a hobby was, they thought I didn’t understand. Someone said it was something you spent a lot of time on. For me that was walking. I practiced my walking. Plus, Aims, my feet are only slightly flat. Dave winks at Aimee and links his arm through hers. I know it’s cold and that’s why we should get moving insteada standing here.

TIME

Aimee examines the naked woman in the mirror with a roving, critical eye. Forgets about searching for her swimsuit, which she knows is probably spawning lint and worn too thin to be decent. Aimee watches her skin tinged a faint sickly green become translucent, the tired purple of her veins as they throb, the walls of her lungs expand and contract, the pulse of her heart quickening. You’re looking peaky, Aimee tells her severely. Dave likes girls with a bit of flesh. Oh, screw Dave. But what does Dave feel when he looks at Alana? She was always so damn stick-thin, and now she’s just skin and bone. And she looks old, so old. How can he be content growing old watching her grow old?

I’m not heartless, Aimee says indignantly to her reflection, which is flanked by (the) silent, viciously-starched sleeves of shirts leaning out from the cupboard. As she speaks, Aimee concentrates on the invisible trajectories of the tiny flecks of spittle which fly from the woman’s mouth and her own. The flecks speckle the surface of the mirror. I am spitting and being spat at the same time, Aimee murmurs. What do you think of that?

The woman’s colour returns in response, obscuring the shallow rhythms of her heart. Pleading I’m not heartless.

RECKONING

Aimee. I’m married.
Aimee. I’m not single.
Aimee. I have a wife.

Aimee doesn’t sleep in her own bed on the night of the day that Dave tells her. She goes to the hospital but when she sees Dave through the window from outside the room, sees Dave is unscathed save for the graze on his cheek, Aimee turns away, but she cannot bring herself to return to her own empty shell of a house. That night, she drifts into restless sleep, sitting in the visitor’s lounge, her head lolling uncomfortably to one side, as Disney cartoons mime vigorously on the screen. Later, she drives home, but still doesn’t enter, and sits on her porch with the cool grey morning. Aimee blows and sucks violently at her harmonica, almost bruising her lips, dragging and straining, wrenching forth tendons and ligaments of sound to drown out Dave’s disclosure.

BROKEN

Dave will never forget the glistening, twisted metal, the acrid smoke, the steamy warmth of Alana’s blood.

DEPTH

Dave cuts into the water, a foreigner, and feels the salt pickle his wounds. Feels the sharp brine soften his scabs and dissolve them, exposing raw, pink, new skin. Feels the scales fall from his eyes.

I am like Naman, Dave thinks. If I believe it can happen. I can be healed through my own belief. Still he stands unmoving in mid-depth, the whipping breeze driving forward mounds of waves which break against his stomach. Dave wonders if Aimee still comes here, even though she spoke of it as a distant memory. Finally, Dave ducks into the water, inelegantly, the cold and the damp striking his face and the tops of his hair, which is thinning. He strokes out hesitantly at first, not wanting to go out of his depth, not wanting to leave the coarse grit that is strangely comforting under the bottoms of his feet. I’ve struck out too many times before. This time I’ll be lucky.

With each stroke Dave slices cleanly through the water, one arm brown and bent, glistening, the other pulling through, taut and straight and strong under the surface. His body ripples and fire arcs through his lungs, which are winded but still whole. Dave wonders if he’s past the safety line, if he’s swum out of the boundary, if he’s lost. But then, Dave thinks, I already am. I can only find myself now.