Splinters

Dedicated to Yulia Meldere

According to Elisabeth Hardwick there are only two reasons to write: desperation and revenge. Which one is hers?

She rubs her strained muscles against the back of a chair in a vain attempt to escape an agitated flock of red ants gnawing at her flesh. Hit by spotlights, turned fully upon her, she stars blindly at the audience swathing her into their expectations of hungry spiders assessing their next meal. She is toying with a book. Not A book! THE BOOK! Her first novel! Her mouth is sand dry. She reaches after the water by her side. She misses. The glass smashes into spiky bits and pieces. In a vain effort to brave her mishap out she makes an attempt at a grin, opens the book on the page marked by the photo of a black cat and starts to read.

She isn’t here out of some little concerns of an author. Actually she hates doing it but she owes it to her publisher, the man who was not only willing to read her manuscript from the beginning until the end, - in contrary to his colleagues who, very probably, not even opened it, - and considered it worthy to start with it his publishing house. She agreed to the reading in the hope he would not just get his investment back, but make some profit.

She gulps down a drink of water that some charitable hand restored by her side, licks her lips and sets out for the reading. Horror stricken she glares at the book sliding out from her fingers to land at the feet of a man seated in the first row. She is aware she should say something cute like- not as bad as the fall of the House of Usher- and turn the accident into a frolic or, still better, to break out into a laugh prompting the audience to join in. Out of her depth, she feels tears mounting into her eyes.

“Here you are.”

A voice risen of the debris of her past, a hand still warm with the aftermath of their caresses, restores the book into her hands patching up the slivers of a broken story, a story with an untold end. Tying forcefully in with the present she clears her throat and starts to read.

The reading finished, not daring to lift her head, she follows her publisher, congratulating her “on her brilliant performance,” to another desk heaped by her novels waiting to be signed. Keeping her eyes lowered as if by not seeing her audience they would disappear she slumps on a chair, her nape cramped, her hand numb, her mouth in a rictus grin, while she signs and signs.

She mumbles: “To whom shall I dedicate the book?”

“Your decision! Mine would be: -To a never-ending love! - Or, better still: -To love re-born from its ashes-”.

She suppresses her urge to block her ears not to hear the voice scraping at love gone.

“Look at me!” He orders and she lifts her head to him as she once did in acceptance of their first kiss.

His smile moves slowly across her face like the shadow of a pallid moon on a starless sky when a lover loves and there is no one to love him back. She recalls their love pending between eternity and never more, then sunk into the region of broken dreams where it ceased to be an option to become a fiction written in the version of her own.

“I can’t allow you to be the sole author of our story nor the sole interpreter of our split. My version is: you didn’t doubt the extent of my love for you. You lacked the courage to accept its inevitability wavering cowardly between my too much and your too little. Neither shall I sign your retreat from my life debasing our stardust memories to a pipe dream.”

“Liar, there has never been a night of stardust promise; there was just the folly of a silent wooing. You can’t consider this as our story just as you can’t judge my whole novel on an excerpt of it.”

“Of course I can! And I will!”

“Excuse me; I have to lock up and…” The publisher stands over them, jingling the keys.

“I didn’t realize it’s so late, sorry!” She stammers.

They step out into the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, so dark, so lonely in synchrony with their mood.

“NO, it’s too late for a drink, some other time, maybe.” She refuses the attempt on his predatory -to be continued-.

“On one of those days, then,” Star struck by her refuse of a happy ending he flags a passing taxi and helps her in, his grin the very image of a loser trying on a smile in a cracked mirror hanged up at the hall of lost dreams,

“Oh, I was about to forget.”

She passes on him the unsigned copy of her novel and is gone - her mind brimming with another version of their sorry ending that will be written neither by despair nor by revenge! There must be some reason for their failure. Go and seek!