"The Week After" #Fridayflash

"Someone shot nostalgia in the back Someone shot our innocence."

Who Killed Mr. Moonlight - Bauhaus



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Shiny leaves bounced in the mediocre shower as I watched two men work in tandem to ease the deceased to his final resting place. Their hair slick and hanging, slapping against cheeks pulled in from exertion and eyes puffy from tears.

The hole was without a headstone, only a mound to indicate a prior individual lay there in the dirt. People needed markers inscribed with comforting verses and clever poems. Humor in the morbid. Couldn't think too hard about the Time, because the rest of the Days would fly by.

I blinked, closing my eyes to hear nature's liquid percussion patter along vinyl tenting and drip off the curved shelter of my umbrella. I was a house. This was my eave. He was buried in my backyard. I pulled my feet out of the gathering muck. It was time to move.

I took a cab back to his apartment. It would always be his in my mind, because I was still a guest. I'd come to help keep him warm, but hadn't earned the right to live in his closet, our clothes mingling, merging and getting lost. Socks of red and black.

A framed photo of us mocked me from the mantel and I lay it face-down. He was gone a week and already I wanted to erase my mind of the happiness. A false start. I'd been left idling in a parking lot where the building was torn down.

I had no meter, only a heart. I wanted to reach inside and turn back the hands, just push back the spring to remember how it felt before I stopped hurting for the right one.