Endings

The bed was just as it always was. Military corners tucked in tight. The coral stain on the pillow half a purple sun.

That’s it, I suppose, he said.

Anyway, you always said I drank too much, she said, draining the glass. It was a lie and she knew it and he knew it.  

There’s always yesterday, I said.

You knew that of course. You had always known. Even though you weren’t there. You’d never been there. And that, you would say if you were here to say it, was the whole point.

She kicked the gull’s skull into the sea. It tumbled, recovered, and right way up, bobbed out into the grey sheet of the outgoing tide.

The surviving shoe lay upside down in the hall for the longest time. For several years, the new owners of the house still felt it unlucky to move it.

She had something important to say, she said, gesturing to him to sit down on the boulder beside the well.

Everywhere, all about her, the stench of singeing songbirds.

He chuckled. He’d been right, the flat-earther, right the whole time.

Tuesday seemed as good a day as any for all of them to stop crying.

He dipped one end of the oar into the water. Felt the heavy stickiness of it in his palms.

He would get another puncture that day.

Maybe the prices would rise tomorrow. Maybe they would fall. Either way, she still had the tractor.

And so this story, with its fully pronounced end and final full stop, was never about life at all.