I watch the thought percolate through Hillman, a ping-pong ball cascading down his mental pegboard. It ricochets off one objection, then another.
'Why not stay in tonight?'
He nods, quick fevered nods. This is the best idea. He has already been thinking this idea. He dimples at me, a single raindrop in bunker sand, as he wriggles the coin over the backs of his fingers like a caterpillar. It's a familiar trick and I smell its brown metal. My stomach is still sour, my ears thick with midnight's noise. Hillman didn't come home til three pm, with the world once again turning nightward.
'You should've seen it,' he says, a human sail billowing from the wall's mast. We swim together in his bourbon smell, his lips purple with love.
I say, 'We aren't freshers any more, Hillman.'
My room is lit by my desk-lamp. Its moonglow picks out the peaks and troughs of his face. He has pouches under his eyes. His greying skin is greasy as a fish on ice. Hillman was a runner at school, long distance track. He is still racing.
'I'll cook,' I say. But he turns his head. He sees condensation on windows, sloughed knitwear, the throwing back of curls. He feels the amber cold in his glass, laughter rubbing his shoulder.
'You know? I might go after all,' he says, a crease between his brows, as if he has arrived at an unexpected destination. He taps my desk with his fingertips. The coin is back in his pocket. 'Yes. I will. Couldn't borrow your shirt, could I? With the puffins?'
We both pretend that it's my shirt-with-the-puffins that he wants, not my blind-turned-back. I won't check my wallet. So we can both still pretend.
Abigail Williams is a writer of flash, short stories and longer form fiction. She has won the Flash 500, placed third in both the Oxford Flash Fiction and Bath Flash Fiction prizes, and won the Exeter Writers short story competition. She seems to have developed a taste for family-based stories and tofu hot dogs, not always at the same time.
'Hillman is Not Himself' was longlisted in the autumn Reflex Fiction Flash Fiction Prize in 2022 and published online.
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