My wife is lost to me, and I am running out of what she left behind.
She traveled at the beginning of every week, taking a commuter flight to Spokane to teach at Gonzaga. Monday mornings she would wake before me, get a rideshare to the airport, and be gone until Thursday. Those mornings when she left, she always wrote me a letter and left it on the kitchen table. The notes were playful, normally about a page long. She’d write out bad jokes, make up dirty stories, draw cartoons… anything she felt inspired to leave behind at the moment. We would still call and text every day, but there was something special about those letters. There was a warmth in them that made me miss her less.
Six weeks ago, her Uber driver was texting and driving. He crossed into oncoming traffic at 60 mph and three cars of people were killed, my wife among them.
I’d gotten up late for work that day and rushed from the house without reading my wife’s letter. The police called me at the office. By the time I got home I knew my wife would never be walking through that door again.
I sat at the dining room table with her letter in front of me. I couldn’t bring myself to read it. It was the very last thing my wife would ever tell me. It would be the last new jokes, the final story. I would never hear a new thing from her ever again.
It took me two weeks to start reading it. First I needed to come up with a plan of how I would go about it. I needed a strategy. I couldn’t just read it thoughtlessly. I decided the best course of action was to read a sentence every week. I block the bottom of the letter with a piece of construction paper. I reread that sentence again and again, and reread the previous week’s sentences as well. I don’t know how many sentences are in the letter. There is no way to count without potentially seeing one of the future sentences. I know I am at the end of the first paragraph this week, about a third of the way down the page.
My wife is gone, and two thirds of a letter is all I have left.
trigger fiction. 