Dust

After six years of blissful marriage, Mark died in a car accident, leaving his wife Susan to grieve her heart out. She was inconsolable and couldn’t bear to be alone in their apartment, which held such fond memories for her but which was now bereft of Mark’s presence. She locked up, gave a set of keys to the next-door neighbour, Mrs Oliver, and asked her to keep an eye on the place while she moved out to the country to stay with her sister.

She gradually mended and became able to remember Mark for the good times, filling the gaping hole of her loss with sweet memories of him. A year passed and she felt ready to return to the city. As the anniversary of Mark’s death approached, she resolved to visit the apartment and retrieve the letters she and Mark had written to each other when they were first going out. They’d put them together when they got married and on rainy Sundays would sometimes bring them out to read again and reminisce.

The apartment smelled musty. In the living room, she stopped at the sideboard they’d bought at a local antiques shop. She ran a finger over the beautiful walnut top, leaving a line in the thick layer of dust that covered it. Smiling ruefully, she made the line into a large ‘M’, wiped her finger and moved on to the bedroom to get the letters. They were not in the cupboard where she’d stored them; they’d been taken out of their envelopes and were strewn across the bed on the bare mattress.

Crying and swearing to herself, Susan gathered them up and went straight round to Mrs Oliver’s. She ripped into the neighbour for meddling in business that wasn’t hers. An aggrieved Mrs Oliver claimed that she hadn’t even set foot inside the apartment, but Susan wasn’t listening; she called Mrs Oliver every name under the sun and demanded the keys back.

Still fuming, Susan returned directly to her hotel in the centre to calm down. That night she ordered dinner in her room, and over a glass of wine she began to read through the letters. Mark’s warmth rose from them like desert shimmer. Her eyes welled up as she read, but these were happy tears. She got to the end of the last one: “I’m sending you all my love, Sooz. Marky X.” Sooz and Marky – their pet names for each other. Susan carefully folded the letter and returned it to its envelope, her heart fluttering as of old.

The next morning she made two phone calls: the first was to her sister to tell her that she’d decided to sell the apartment; the second was to a cleaning company. She dropped the spare keys off at their offices and caught the first train back to her sister’s.

Two days later, the company sent a cleaner round to the apartment. She’d never seen anything quite like it: every single surface – the floor, the tables, the shelves – was covered with a strange word, written over and over again in the dust. On the sideboard it was written just once:

‘MARKYLSOOZ’

“Huh, kids!” the cleaner muttered to herself as she set about wiping all the surfaces clean with a duster, tutting all the while.

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