“That was a lovely walk we had this afternoon,” Mary Yangherkin said. She rested her open book on her lap and shifted position in the loveseat just enough to face her husband, Woody.
He blinked absently and turned toward her, pushing his glasses until they rested firmly on the bridge of his nose. He set his book down in a motion nearly identical to hers. The lamp on the end table beside the loveseat backlit her, bringing flyaway strands of her graying hair into stark and shadowy relief. Mary wore a faint half-smile, a faraway look in her unfocused eyes. She looked towards him but not at him, her head cocked slightly to the right. She saw through him—him and everything else.
Woody loved that look. It meant that she was casting her mind back, reliving their walk as fully as human memory allowed. He’d seen the look a thousand times—more—and knew that it meant that she was happy. She always said, “any moment lived in happiness is worth reliving.”
He called the look her McFly Look. The name didn’t really fit, she unfailingly protested, because Marty McFly had been trying to get Back to the Future and she was trying to revisit the past, but Woody always waved off the criticism. It didn’t matter which way you went; time travel was time travel, and that made it her McFly look.
“It was,” Woody said, smiling. He took Mary’s hand and squeezed it, then leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. Mary returned to the present and smiled. They picked their books up, settled themselves comfortably once again, and went back to reading.
They’d ventured out into the cold winter afternoon on a whim, heading into the woods behind their property. The forest was quiet, muffled by the previous night’s snow. That still, pristine world was theirs and theirs alone, an intimate secret just for them.
Woody loved venturing into unmarred snow; he sometimes felt that it erased all the footsteps that had come before his, allowing him the opportunity to be the First, allowing him to Discover that small section of the world. It was a behavior Woody had first displayed as a boy. He’d trek off into the snow on his own, discovering new lands, battling goblins and frost imps. It was as if the snow-white world before him was a blank canvas, his imagination the brush and paint. He’d continued this habit until he’d had kids of his own. Giving it up had been hard for Woody, but he felt it necessary; his kids had deserved their own blank canvas.
But the kids were gone now, busy with the Real World, and so this frozen world belonged to him. To him and his wife. His partner. His Mary.
Mary, for her part, marveled at this side of him and reveled in it. Woody was by no means a stoic man, but seeing this side of him made it child’s play to imagine what he had been like in the naïve days of his youth. This never failed to elicit a smile from her.
On this particular jaunt they’d walked for perhaps fifteen minutes when they’d happened across a buck. Busy rubbing it’s antlers on a tree, it had failed to hear them approach. It froze upon realizing its mistake, muscles tensed, sizing them up. It stared at them, and they at it, for what felt like an eternity, until, with a twitch of its ears and a cloud of breath, it bounded off, zig-zagging through the trees. They’d headed back to the house after that, giddy with their good luck, as snow began to fall again in earnest and the sky grew dark.
Now they sat together in front of the fireplace, reading, a light blanket thrown over their laps. They sat together but apart, seated next to each other while simultaneously in their own private worlds. Their time together was demarcated only by the tick of the clock on the mantle and the crackling of the fire, their time apart by the events in the stories that had enveloped them.
Duke Ellington’s “Prelude To a Kiss” broke suddenly into the silence. Woody found his bookmark and inserted it into his book. He set it on the end table, and picked up his phone, turning off the customized alarm. He stretched enthusiastically, removed his side of the blanket from the top of his lap and stood up. He stretched again for good measure.
"8 o'clock already?" asked Mary.
"Mm-hmmm," replied Woody.
"8 o'clock already?" asked Mary.
"Mm-hmmm," replied Woody.
“I love you,” Mary said. She looked up at him with a smile, her book momentarily opened upon her lap once more.
“And I love you,” Woody replied. He bent over and kissed her on the forehead. “Now I’m off for a wank.”
Mary leaned into the kiss. “Have fun,” she said, and playfully swatted his backside as he walked away.
The End
--Gryffindork
AWESOME. My dinner came out my nose. Thank you. I was really lost in the story and visual of the events leading up to the ending. I was wondering when the Jason I knew would come out and play in the story. And once again, you did not disappoint!
ReplyDeleteGlad you enjoyed it, and that I didn't disappoint.
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