"A Short Story." ~This is what I hope to achieve with all stories I tell.
Tom was writing the “Great American Novel”. He hunched over the well-worn journal, sitting in an empty park as the morning sun warmed the page on which he wrote. His hero had, so far, come of age and was about to meet the Girl. His one true love would be the girl next door, of course. She would be the girl who helped him up after the playground bully pushed him off the swing in elementary school. The girl who always smiled and waved in high school, even though he was a hopeless, awkward, bespectacled goof. She was the girl who would meet him by purest chance after he became a confident young man, and she would admit to always having liked him, but never being brave enough to speak up. Yes. He was well on his way to capturing the hearts of his readers. He was certain of it, and quite lost in that thought when he heard a laugh.
She had a laugh that was like the laugh of many children. You could almost hear gleeful 5 year olds giggling without control. He loved her laugh. He had never heard her or met her before. But he loved her laugh. She seemed so familiar to him. Everything about her evoked a memory he held dear and treasured inside him. Her hand was like the bedroom in the house where he grew up. Like the lake where his father took he and his brother fishing.
The curve of her neck, so like the sun-dappled path through the woods behind his house. The path where he would ride his bike to his secret hiding place among the trees. Her hair was very like the dark that descended when he had seen his first movie and sat quivering with excitement at the wonders on the screen. Her eyes gave him the comfort and jolt of his first morning cup of coffee. The one drug he could never learn to do without.
She had simply appeared in front of him. One moment he was madly scribbling the latest addition to his story, lost in his created world. The next he was looking up at her and feeling the most acute sense of déjà vu he had ever experienced. He was gob smacked. His lips moved, but no words came. She laughed again. This time it was more mature. It was more like ocean waves washing up onto the shore and over his feet as he walked towards the setting sun.
He should know her, he thought, as she sat down, leaving only a whisper of space between them. He breathed in the scent of her and was reminded of summer days in the backyard spent sipping honeysuckles the way Clara had shown him. Clever Clara, who always knew the best way to waste a day.
“Hello,” she said. He heard birdsong when she spoke.
“Hello,” he managed to say through the nostalgic haze he was in. He tried desperately to pin her face to a specific place in his memory, tried and failed. “I’m Tom.” He held out his hand. She looked down at it the same small smile on her face.
For a while she just looked at the offered hand, then took it and turned it over. She examined his palm, pressing her fingertips to the little ink stains that always seemed to find their way onto his hand when writing. When she touched him a strange feeling crept over him. It began as wonder, and as the contact continued, became anticipation; a sort of maddening tension. Just before she let go the feeling stole around his heart with soft gentle arms and squeezed. He gave a slight gasp. When she let go the feeling lessened but did not disappear.
“Who are you?” he blurted. He was befuddled by her, even more by his reaction to her. Not attraction, really, but definitely connection.
“I don’t have a title yet,” she said. Tom didn’t understand what she meant. But right now he didn’t understand anything. She was like no one and nothing he had ever experienced. And yet she was altogether comfortable and familiar to him. Where had they met? How had they interacted? That he couldn’t remember was driving him crazy. Yet, she seemed wholly content to sit with him in silence.
“Where did you come from?” The question was rhetorical of course, more for him than anything else. But as she gazed at him with dark eyes, now seemingly filled with a galaxy of stars, he knew she would answer him.
“You,” she said simply, and tapped the journal in his lap. She looked around, surveying the park. “What should we do next?”
Tom looked at the book in his lap. As he tried to make sense of what she said his eyes fell on the last sentence he had written.
It said: “What should we do next?”
