Author: Fall Writing Contest

Henry stood in Rachel’s bedroom, holding the fiery red leaf he had picked up on his morning walk. He’d brought it as a gift but now he felt foolish standing in her room holding a leaf, even if it was beautiful. He placed it on the dresser and sat on the edge of the bed, where her scent lingered in the unmade sheets.

He knew what she would say: they had an agreement. A business transaction. Seven years was long enough to not arouse suspicion, but short enough that they could still find true love, if that’s what they wanted. Rachel had rolled her eyes and made quotation marks in the air at true love, as if anyone could believe in that fairy tale.

Henry dreaded the sound of his wife’s car pulling into the driveway, because it meant he had to tell her two days before their divorce he had somehow accidentally, amazingly, fallen in love with her.

When I try to remember his name now, all these years later, I have trouble. Stephen … that much I know. I think about him occasionally, when I feel melancholy and misunderstood or when the air turns crisp and leaves start to spin down to the earth. What was his last name? Robert? George? A double first name, I think, but this recollection could be a casualty of time. Most of my memories from that October are fuzzy.

Some are still sharp and clear, unrelentingly so, like the long, empty stare from Alma’s eyes after her shock treatments. And the lopsided grins of the paper pumpkins the nurses hung on the walls of the common room, to remind us that fall was still falling outside. The world was still out there, somewhere, spinning, buzzing, getting on with life. For us, the world was only the shabby existence we found within these walls; still, stagnant, and much too quiet.

When the snow came their breath turned slow and deep. The orchard stood bare, the apples long since crushed and drained, their juice strained into bottles and tucked away to hibernate in the old barn. Stephen and Marjorie retreated to their room. They still had work to do.

This was how Stephen treated it, like a chore left unfinished. The last piece of business to take care of before the year turned over. So Marjorie sidled up to him, soft and sweet, though warier than she’d been when they were first married. Afterward she molded her body to his in hopeful exhaustion, and they slept. Yet every few weeks when they woke to red drops on white sheets, Stephen’s jaw set a little more. “We’ll try again” turned into “same as last year, and the year before.” Finally he said nothing, and the silence between them rang out over the frozen landscape.

He left when the ground thawed. He packed his trunk, strapped it in the back of the Chrysler, and drove down the front lawn, leaving deep ruts in the wet ground. Two weeks later a letter arrived for Marjorie saying he’d be back when the apples were ripe.

She wouldn’t hold her breath.