We wrap it in tissue paper and tie it with string and place it beside my skinny jeans and your dead-worm tequila.
How we bulge with our unmet future. Not done, just different – we promise to come back for our tissue-wrapped hearts and saunter past the ruins of other loves: charred smouldering lightning-struck. Sad grey diminished. Loves felled by infidelity. Not us, we say.
The rivers are a surprise. We’ll go straight through. You wade on, arms aloft. Too deep, too wide, the waters sweep me across sleepless oceans, past Lego tundra, over deserts of fever, through jungles of clinging arms. As I come up gasping for air I see you on the shore, bone dry, whistling.
The raft years. I sit among filthy grows with cracked nipples and watch you watch TV and get promoted and talk to pretty girls at parties and I wonder how you still look like you. I scratch my slack skin, twist my thin hair.
Baby baby baby. Barely room to turn around on that raft.
The tide deposits me in the end, parched, with a stone in my chest. I wonder if you even know I was gone. I scrabble through tissue paper, tug at the string searching for the love we left, soft as mohair, big as the sky, but when I spread it across my lap it barely reaches my knees. The babies – larvae, you say – laced it in holes, shrunk it with spit. I’ve been too long adrift. I’ve nothing for you but spine and rib and salt and hurt.
Morning clatters my eyelids. Needle on needle. Acres of yarn. You are aged in the breaking dawn, face cracked with concentration, our moth-eaten love in your lap.
It’ll take time, you say.
But I can wait. I can wait.
Abigail Williams is a northerner living in Devon. She writes flash, short and longer form fiction. Her work has won, been placed or listed in various competitions including the Bath Flash Fiction Prize, Oxford Flash Fiction competition, the Bridport Prize, Mslexia flash and short story competitions, Fish Flash Fiction Prize, Flash500 and Exeter Novel Prize. Her work has been published recently in Frazzled Lit, Molotov Cocktail, and Fictive Dream. Find her on BlueSky @abbywilliams.bsky.social.
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