When I Wasn't
By Stephen Bush
The first things to go are from immediate necessity: the food mouldy in the fridge because you hadn’t the appetite in time or it was mine and you didn’t like it. Your brother helps you with this while you’re numb at the table, elbows nailed into its teak. He places a furred loaf of linseed bread and a carton of sour almond milk into a bin bag, doing his best not to rustle it. When neither you nor I are looking, he disappears it. My attention is near your cheek, on a newborn beard whose bristles refuse, however close I lean, to sting me. I place my hand over yours and for a second I can pretend, but you twitch and ruin the illusion. This isn’t your fault; you didn’t know. Your wrist bisects me, unnoticeably. I watch your brother finish, bear-hug, and leave, and then, eventually, watch you rest.
The second things to go are for convenience: my lotions in the bathroom you’ve re-homed to the ends of the shelf. In the shower, I admire you through steam, happy to see you’ve been eating, gotten back to the regime. I’d tried huffing on the mirror once to write on it but if I register to you, it’s undirected, as memory. By now, I’m barely perceptible to myself. I imagine fogged breath or mist – or less – would be the skin of me. Abruptly one morning you scrunch my exfoliating mitt, hoicking it soggily to the floor. Pleasingly, I think, this was easy, or not as hard as it could have been, for it wouldn’t have held the form or scent of my hand. I don’t remember those that well now, either. When I wasn’t watching, you moved the mitt into the bin.
The third things to go are because there’s a cost to keep them: memberships and magazine subscriptions. I watch my post heap on the mat, crumpled by the door, then neatly in strata on the countertop, square on – your brother’s doing – but unopened. One night, I watch you washed in fridge light, pouring out wine but not drinking it. You tackle the stack at our desk instead, informing, cancelling, and calling, clear-headed. Your severity impresses but bores me, so I push where my lips were through the glass, sprawl out in a serene lagoon of Chablis. I can’t call to mind any flavour. I’d long stopped trying something similar with you. When I wasn’t watching, you gave away my clothes.
The final thing to go is from necessity. There’s a girl in the flat now, Emma. She visits increasingly, and bracingly, like a gale. She’s moved in a toothbrush, candlesticks, and shoes. I like her; she’s kind to you. She wears a scarf in bed when she’s cold. I don’t think of it as ours now. The sheets are new, in a pattern I wouldn’t choose, and never knew my skin. I watch you like a naturalist taking notes. One day, when I wasn’t, you’d gone.
THE END
Author Bio: Stephen J. Bush was born in Bath, England, and lives in Xi’an, China, where he works as a biologist. His fiction can be found, or is forthcoming, in Bending Genres, Lost Balloon, Oyster River Pages, and Panorama, among others.