§tandby - The Thinning

The gray had been going by a long time.

He did not know how long. Time was one of the things that had stopped coming when he reached for it. He sat. The seat was rough under his right hand. His left hand lay where he had set it down and did not take much notice of him now. His left leg was a weight against the other one, a thing he carried and did not own. The left side of his mouth had gone to sleep and had not woken.

He breathed. The gray went by. He did not look for anything in it. There was nothing in it to find and the looking cost.

A woman sat across from him with a bag on her knees. She had always been there. Now and again she said a kind thing to the air.

Down the carriage someone laid a hand on someone's arm. A small thing. A hand set on a sleeve and left there, the small weight of a hand that means easy now, that means stay.

Something in his chest turned over.

His right hand came up off his knee. It went out across the rough seat, reaching, and it knew what it reached for before he did.

Warmth. A hand on his arm, come out of a warm house into the cold to fetch him. A blue ring of flame in the dark and the smell of the burning of it. A table. Cards laid out in a fan on a cloth. A face that did a small braced thing when he talked too much, a face he had always wanted to smooth back to easy. A voice at a door. Come inside now. Please. He had gone inside. He had gone inside for the warmth and the hand. For her.

The name.

He reached for the name and the reaching went out into nothing.

He had all of her. The cards fanned out on the cloth, the glasses pushed up, the little blue flame in the dark. The braced face going easy under his hand. The whole of it sat in him, bright and entire, and there was no word on any of it. Someone had lifted the word off the picture and left the picture. His mouth made the front of a shape. The lips came together for it, soft. M. Then the shape went too, and his lips were only his lips, slack on the dead side, and the bright warm picture sat in him with nothing to call it by.

He tried the bigger word. The flat small word he had said ten thousand times and never once heard. The word for what she was to him.

My.

Nothing came after it. The slot was there, smooth, swept clean, and the warmth ran into it and found no shape to take and spilled out the sides. A person-shaped warmth in the middle of him and no word to hold it. He sat with his right hand out over the seat, reaching at the gray, his mouth working on the live side and the dead side both, and made no sound, and the want of the word was a hole the size of his whole life.

The woman with the bag watched his mouth work.

"Your good lady will have kept it warm," she said. Kind. Certain. To the air. "Don't you go fretting about that."

The words went into the hole.

They fit. They were not the right words. There had been a right word, his own, small and worn smooth with saying, and it was gone. But these came in their dark coats and stood in the empty place and filled it, and the filling was such an ease that he shut his eyes against it. His good lady. He had a good lady and she was keeping it warm. The thickness behind his eye let go. His pulse came down off its hard beat. The hole had a thing in it now, and the thing was her word, the stranger's word, and the having of anything at all in that place was the same sweet ease as the spoons set down uncounted.

"Aye," he said. The word came thick and slow off the working side of his mouth. "The good lady. She'll have kept it."

And the part of him that had once stood out on a cold step, turned the wrong way, counting in the dark for the sake of a warmth he could no longer name, lay down quiet and did not get up.

§§ : https://www.abctales.com/collection/period-pieces