Eleanor Porter
Her Story
It was in the air when she woke; the dog was delighted to see her of course, but the windows dribbled condensation. The kitchen was too thick with silence for breakfast. Her apple blinked. She swallowed, opened the lid. So. She hadn’t thought that it would come so soon.
He began with compliments. She scanned for the ‘but.’ There were two of them. Double buts, like a weary sigh, or a shit pushed painfully, with, oh, such relief. Perhaps, she thought, if I’d waited, if I’d opened the curtains first, the words would be different, the black marks arranged to some other pattern. Stupid! Why would it have read any differently in the light? He’d sent the damn thing yesterday after all.
It wasn’t cruel. Except that any rejection by email is cruel. No, it was in its way carefully, generously worded. It praised her qualities; it fulsomely, fulsomely praised them. But, but, it said, she left him with a sense of flatness. A deadening hopelessness. There was no going forward.
She grabbed the lead and the dog and stepped into the empty street and its rain. ‘I love you,’ she said to the dog, ‘you’re the only one who understands me. You’re my only true friend.’
The street wasn’t quite empty. The man on the pavement looked away. She reddened. The dog was a dog. Bouncing, shit-eating, strokeably warm, but a dog.
He needed more laughter the email said. More lightness. He needed hope. The problem is, he said, that in the end, you’re in love with disappointment.
This was the bit that made her sight wobble; made a tight ache come. She read it again. And again.
The hills were made of stone that had boiled once. Today they were cold and shrouded. She welcomed the mist. Wrapped herself in it. Even though the bench was wet she sat on it. It seemed fitting. Was he right, perhaps?
Is this an ending? Whose?
His, she decided. She would find someone else. There were plenty. She wouldn’t try to persuade him, change his mind. Oh no. She’d show him. She threw the ball in a great questing arc along the hillside. It disappeared into the fug with the dog rolling after it.
The ball was lost. All she’d done was startle a crow. The dog went back and forth searching, searching. Lost. Never mind, she called, but how was the dog to understand a phrase like that?
The world was flat and white and that was all there was.
She started on the path back down. Who was she kidding? It wasn’t his ending. He’d walked away already. And after all he had been kind, after a fashion. Perhaps he was right. She was lacking. She couldn’t pull things off. The path was slippery; she went more slowly for fear of missing her footing. I’ve missed my footing all my life. Her abiding theme, her tune, he said; disappointment.
On the path below a mountain biker had almost finished mending a puncture and was swinging her bike back upright. ‘I like it like this,’ the biker said unprompted, ‘with the mist. All undecided.’
‘Yes,’ she said, being polite. She realised it was true, ‘I like it too.’
She watched the biker slither off and almost fall, then right herself. When I get back, she thought I’ll make myself a cake. I’ll cook it and sit and eat it. I’ll write a reply with sugar on my tongue. I won’t be penned so neatly.
All undecided, she said, trusting her boots to the rock and following after the dog, off the path, under the lichened branches. Here she was in leaf mulch and birdsong, in swathes of cloud, everything familiar strange again.
Eleanor Porter
Eleanor Porter lives in the English West Midlands where she teaches literature and creative writing and writes, too, whenever she can. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in a range of journals, including Stand, MsLexia, Channel Magazine and Dreamcatcher. She has also published two historical novels, The Wheelwright’s Daughter and The Good Wife with Boldwood Books. At present she is working on a postapocalyptic speculative novel provisionally called The Haze.