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| Alarmingly Strange Stories |
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Little Affection |
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| . She sits crosslegged on the floor and stares at the mottled, mildew-ridden cardboard box in front of her as if it might contain a deadly serpent. Her eyes are red and bloodshot from the tears she has shed, and the box wavers in and out of focus through the fresh tears she feels welling up like waves lapping at an embankment, slowly undermining it. Tonight he will bring the divorce papers for her to sign. Everything has been arranged, all the lawyers have approved; all that remains is for her to add her signature. She sips from her wineglass and sighs, wondering why she feels as if her viscera are charged with slivers of broken glass. He had never been faith-ful, she knows that. He gambles. He's a mean drunk. His cool, stoic indifference, for which she had loved him when she was young and naive, has been a wall between them, killing all closeness. Why, then, has the fury she felt when he first walked out not abated? In the box are the few pathetic remnants of her childhood. School year-books, some cheap junk jewellery, all the detritus left behind on the road to adulthood. And her diaries. She has not looked in the box for many years. Since retrieving it from the old apartment after her mother died, it has lain abandoned in a closet, though never quite forgotten. With sudden decision, she opens the box, allowing a breath of sepulchral air to escape it. Inside the box, time and neglect have had their way with the contents, swelling books with dampness and coating earrings with a patina of corrosion. One by one she removes the items from the box, giving each a glance before setting it on the carpet and moving on to the next. She stops once, lingering over a pickle jar. Inside, at the bottom, is a crust of some old liquid long since turned to a rime of crystals. She frowns, shaking the jar a little so the crystals rattle around inside. There's a vague feeling of recognition, a memory jarring loose. Something she has forgotten about for many years. She has tightness in her stomach, as if something inside is warning her not to pull the scab from memories better left sealed up. A thought flashes across her mind. Milk. Why would she have kept milk in a pickle jar, she wonders. Surely milk did not form crystals like this when it dried, did it? And the crystals, why do they seem almost to... Phosphoresce in the dim light? Almost unconsciously her hand is drawn to one of her old diaries, its cover, once hot pink, now a dingy grey. This is what she has been looking for. In this book she will find her soon-to-be ex-husband, and see him through eyes untainted with the cynicism that comes of the transition from child to adult. And something else. Something about milk. As old memories stir restlessly in their graves, she opens the diary to a page in the middle and begins reading. . |
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