by Steven John
We found each other late in life, in the most fateful way. Two lonely people. Paths crossed. ‘The Last Waltz’ she called us.
I’d meet her off the train once a month. We’d go to the station hotel for tea and toast to settle jittery tummies. I carried something stronger in a hipflask but she never needed it. I confess to an occasional nip, waiting for her on the platform.
We’d sit in the hotel lounge-bar and hold hands, start again from where we left off, blow on embers still smouldering, it never took much for flames to re-ignite.
“You like old things, don’t you,” she said. I suppose I did.
I’d drive us to visit castles or art galleries, but museums were our favourite, natural history. I’d zigzag her through the galleries of skeletons – stand up close to the great apes and gaze into their eye sockets. She said I had a childlike fascination with life. I’d look into her blue eyes and agree. She was indeed a beautiful fascination.
In the evening we’d go for dinner. We’d talk about our lives, laughing, sometimes crying. Those were the moments when cloaks lifted from our shoulders. I’d never felt so alive. After dinner we’d go to her beloved theatre or recitals. She opened my eyes to many horizons.
On the day we had our photograph taken in our favourite gallery, she told me we’d never see each other again. She told me she had to care for someone close to her, someone impossible to leave.
I said it was appropriate then that we were photographed by the skeleton of a large bird.
“Because we’re about to become extinct,” I said, “Like the dodo. They’ll never be another like us.”
I put her on an earlier train. Neither of us wanted a long goodbye. I watched the train blend into the smog like I was waking from a dream.
Now I walk alone along the castle walls and amongst the museum skeletons.
I curate my memories of us.
Lay down my own archaeology.
Steven John’s writing has appeared in Burningword, Bending Genres, Spelk, Fictive Dream, EllipsisZine, Ghost Parachute and Best Microfiction 2019. He’s won Bath Ad Hoc Fiction a record seven times and has been nominated for BIFFY 2019. He lives in The Cotswolds, England. Steven is Fiction & Special Features Editor at New Flash Fiction Review.
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