Prison Break Fic: Variations on a Theme of Almost and Never (1/1)
Summary: A man, a woman, and the different choices that make up a life.
Characters/Pairing: Michael Scofield/Sara Tancredi, mentions of Lincoln Burrows, Veronica Donovan, LJ Burrows, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Tancredi, and Bruce Bennett
Genre/Rating: Het/Mild NC17
Length: ~ 2,900 words
Author's Note: Especially for skybelpb, an unbelievably wonderful woman. I'm so, so glad to have met you in this life. Thanks for everything. *hugs*
Let me tell you a story-or stories, one is rarely enough-of despair and disclosure, of hope and pain, of turns and forks in the road, of the need to flee and to find, the longing to believe, and the possibility of joy. There will be truth within lies, tricks and smoke. I tell you nothing new. They may or may not end to your heart's desire. And they all begin, like so many stories that have been spun since the dawn of words, with this:
A man and a woman.
.
A few days before she turns twenty nine, the woman stands in her house, looks out the window at the world, and makes a wish.
Before that she had been a girl, a good girl, a compassionate, though sheltered, child. Her father was confident and shrewd, a born leader, the center of an ever-expanding circle of influence. Her mother was attentive, sociable-perfect except for one thing, this black dot in a milky stretch of white: a terrible weakness, a dangerous compulsion that they kept hush-hush.
One lonely, interminable summer, her father said, Your mother and I have to take care of something very important. She was whisked away to the beach. When she came back home her mother was arranging flowers at the dining room table. There was the smell of freshly baked bread, and her mother was smiling, a pretty apron around her waist. Come here, sweetie. She broke out into a run and threw herself into her arms.
The girl who was twelve grew up to be a doctor; she never wavered (except perhaps once or twice, because it's true what they say, the apple does not fall far from the tree) but like the other beasts and stains of their immaculate life her recklessness was subdued, scrubbed vigorously away, and at twenty eight she was married to a man with a bright, bright future.
But this is not our man.
Our man never knew his father. The father had been, by all accounts, a wastrel with a wandering eye. The mother had been loving, but was gone too soon. His older brother brought him up, single-handedly it would often seem, and he would do an excellent job. But pushed into the jaws of overwhelming responsibility, with no one to lead by example, this brave, tough brother would lose his way.
Our man was born with a trait very few have, something their mother, from the time they were young, had always seen as a gift instead of a curse. He used it to his advantage; sometimes it felt as though it was all that he had. He was also exceedingly tenacious. The straight arrow to his brother's troubled soul, he hung on for both of them when the other one flagged. He was, finally, the strong instead of the weak one, and he would save what he could.
They pulled together and pressed on, working nights and summers to get by, to get out. Their mother had left them nothing except each other, but it was all they would ever need.
And now he is married, to a woman he met during a trip to Baja. They are a hard-working, fine-looking couple. His brother is married to the love of his life; more than the considerable sum of money in the bank, more than the plush apartment in the quiet, affluent neighborhood he calls home, this is what he's happiest about.
It's a life he's justly earned. On a good day, like today, he sits in his corner office, looks out onto Chicago, feels deeply thankful, and tries to ignore the little voice in his head that longs for something he cannot name. Minutes away, in a big house on a tree-lined street, the woman who is almost twenty nine stands by the window, and gazes unseeingly at the clear ivory afternoon. She might wish for rain, the kind that is pleasantly light; her husband will be home soon, and she would love fifteen minutes between the sheets, the soft melodious drumming of the rain against the roof keeping time to the rhythm of their blood. Or she might wish for a blinding torrent, for her husband to call and say Honey, I'll wait this one out, I will be late, before turning back to the flowers waiting for her attention on the dining room table-impossibly red, painfully conspicuous, and smelling of doom.
The man and the woman will never meet.
.
Or let me tell you a story about a man and woman, only this time the woman who had been a girl who had been twelve came home one day to silence and grief. The house was dark; her mother had left her forever, to come back to the world only in dreams, and suddenly everything else was dark, too. It was as if a fissure had gone through the family left behind; the girl's father turned into a stranger, stepping back and letting go, and she drifted from him, a ship without a sail borne away by the tide.
She figured she could save others, if not her mother, so she became doctor. But like her mother she would fall for that high that was as sweet as the chase, that blissful, delicious escape from the illusion of her well-heeled, perfect life. Years later, she would come upon a marionette tossed on the street, broken and silent-a boy she could have saved, her chance at redemption-but instead of waking from her trance she burrowed deeper into slumber, running, just running away from it all.
Three years later, the man sits in his corner office and considers the magnificent view of Chicago before him, ignoring the soft restless voice in his head. The phone rings. His wife's voice flows to him like honey: Sam and I are visiting her brother in the hospital. Pick me up after work? In the hospital, members of the press mill around the nurses' station. His wife places her hand on his arm as they make their way out. Haven't you heard? The governor's daughter tried to kill herself. No, he had been too busy to check the papers that morning.
She offers to drive. In the car, he looks at the newspaper his wife hands him, at the doctor's photograph on page three. It was taken from her yearbook, with her senior grade quote and all. She looked so happy, he thinks. Such a shame.
.
Better yet, let us return to that twenty-eight-year-old woman, except now she’s in an apartment, it’s nighttime, and she's going, a little frantically, through the bureaus and shelves. To and fro she paces, a slight figure in flight. She lives alone. There are no flowers on the dining room table, no husband in her life. There is also no dental floss in the house.
There is a sharp, colorful oath before she finally grabs her keys.
As for the man, save for the sun and the sand and the cool nights in hammocks swigging cheap beer, the trip to Baja was uneventful. There is no wife. All he has is his older brother, one he is so tired of being the older brother to-tired of footing the bill, of making excuses, of saying, “I don’t know where he is,” when his nephew shows up at his doorstep, searching for someone, something, that both of them have long since lost.
In a 7-Eleven, he scours the shelves hastily for food and drink suitable for a sixteen-year-old-funny how his nephew never drops by and stays for the night when his kitchen is stocked-eager to get back home to the prints on his desk. Tomorrow’s presentation is heavy on his mind; work always is, with nothing else to crowd it out. He makes his choices, grabs them, and in the race to the check-out slams into a woman emerging from Personal Care.
Oof. Dr. Pepper and Oral-B Ultra Floss meet in mid-air and land, hard, in the middle of the alley, as people scramble in all directions, steering clear.
“Oh, hell,” the man exclaims, diving for his loot. He spares the woman a cursory glance. She recovers and straightens, floss in hand. Without another word he turns and leaves.
“Asshole,” the woman hisses at his retreating back.
.
Now we jump back to the start, steel ourselves, and advance. The road crooks and slopes, and we enter a forest of unseen figures and long, undulating shadows. There are debts to be paid, traps to be set. Things aren’t what they seem. There is malice in the undergrowth, and it grows thick, festers and spreads, ensnaring the older brother, slipping a gun in his hand. Take this, it whispers, sickly-sweet into his ear, and everything will go away. But he side-steps, leaving the creepers with jaws for leaves and fangs for buds snapping at empty air. His raven-haired love tells his younger brother what he could not for years, and with a stroke of our man’s hand the debt is paid, the air is cleared.
The woman had gone down a similar path, one where a boy lay bleeding. She snapped awake, delirious. She called someone who said he’d come if she asked; when his figure filled her vision she broke down, crying, begging for release. Take this, he said, we’ll work something out. It was his hand. She grabbed it, her buoy in the middle of her ocean. For a brief moment this gentleman her family had known for years felt like the father she needed, and she started to believe that all would be well again.
Driving home late one night mere days before her birthday, she cries out in alarm as two men rush straight onto her path two blocks from her house. She slams on the brakes; in the glare of her headlights their eyes burn blue. Please help us, one of them gasps. It’s clear they’ve been running. My brother, he’s hurt.
She looks from him to the other figure now kneeling before her car and back again. Even before she nods the man pushes away from the window as though he’d read the tiniest trace of consent on her face. His hand leaves an imprint on the glass. She stares at it; a few seconds more, and it’s gone.
Soon they’re behind her in the car. We’re not going to hurt you. She knows this somehow, but her intuition is not something she entirely trusts, so she’s glad to hear the words, although they’re just that, words-God shows she’s fallen for so much less. In the house she sees to the gunshot wound as best as she can. Thank you. Thank you very much. She answers in figures and logic: blood loss, infection, shock, hospital. No, they’ll take their chances with her. The men exchange looks, entire unspoken conversations passing between them.
She doesn’t ask questions, but later, after his brother finally falls into a morphine-induced sleep, the man answers them anyway: We’re live bait. We’re the easiest way to get to someone. To flush him out.
In the silence of early dawn his voice is rough and deep. A chill travels up her spine. Flush who out? her mind wonders, but she doesn’t ask. Perhaps it’s the silhouette of his body, or the suddenness of him, leaping out at her after years of dispossession. Perhaps it was the longing the morphine brought to life as it passed through her hands. Standing before him her body is screaming for something to fill the cavern it left behind, and she sees that he will do.
He will do.
They will leave in the morning. Everything-the anxious looks, his quiet thankfulness, her skin missing him even before he’s gone-tells her that she will never see them again. She takes what she can. He meets her halfway, with a barely reined-in alacrity. So much consideration when all she wants is to be taken away, to be torn apart. She claws at him, all fingers and mouth. He grabs her hands and holds them together, presses one wrist against the other within his palms, calms her down. He smiles against her lips, her complicit angel. Hold still. Hush-hush.
She’s burning, nothing but molten liquid inside. He enters her and she’s ready, in a flash of heat and sound and smoke. She doesn’t even know his name, or he hers, so she cries out something unfathomable, and he murmurs a secret into her throat, and it’s old and hard and bleak and lush, something she’s always known but never knew she did. The light streaks in faint slivers through the room, illuminating long fingers fisting her hair tracing her mouth stroking her deep, falling on the pale skin of her shoulders, on the arm around her waist pulling her fast to him as he takes her from behind, his palm pressing low on her belly, below her navel, his mouth an uncompromising exploration.
The second time it happens it’s slower, just him slowly rocking into her, vivid eyes studying her face. Afterwards they check on their patient for the tenth time. Spent, she falls asleep. He sits on the edge of the bed and watches her, thinking of words to forgotten songs about wild horses and burning water and the end of the world, fighting the urge to stay just one more day.
They’re gone when she wakes up. She calls in sick to work. It’s a small clinic and they’re seriously understaffed, but she does it, anyway. She looks out the window at the world and does something she hasn’t for years: she makes a wish, as absurd as a small child’s. Everything tells her that she will never see him again, but she does it, anyway.
.
And now. Wind back to early morning. The woman stirs and sees the man watching her from the edge of the bed. Once again she advises him against haste. This time, she wins. Before noon she makes two calls: one to work to say she’s come down with the flu, the other to a family friend, that gentleman who has always been there for her, for additional supplies.
It’s a call she should not have made. On her birthday, a day after the brothers disappear, she comes home to find a stranger in her house, a stranger with a gun. He plies her with questions and various, unspeakable ways of extracting the truth. Each time, her answer is the same. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Her death is one on a long list of consequences the man will carry with him throughout his life. He marries but divorces soon thereafter--an attempt at union that was doomed before it even began. Even in his old age his daughter will catch him standing still, lost in thought, tears filling his eyes. She embraces him with all her might, but even as he lets her, his meager frame shaking in her arms from a lifetime of guilt and regret, she knows that it is not, will never be, enough.
.
Bring the woman back to life. She’s twelve years old again, and there’s something terribly wrong with her mother, something her father will fix. In the meantime she will stay with a family friend, a man she will drive to frustration many, many times in her grown-up life. But for now, he takes her to her room, helps her line up her dolls on her bed--she still likes them, she finds--takes her to the pool for a swim.
Down by the pool a boy sits reading in the shade. Another boy is taking the leaves out of the water with what looks like a rake. He’s my brother, the boy says. She sits beside him and he tells her about his book, something about airplanes. What do you think? he asks. He stares at her too much, is what she thinks. Sorry, the boy replies. They talk until it’s time for them to leave, about airplanes and more airplanes. To her, it feels like time just flew.
A few days before her twenty-ninth birthday the memory of that afternoon suddenly comes to her, and she smiles, her hand sliding over the slight swell of her stomach. Minutes away, in a corner office in a building in downtown Chicago, the man picks up the phone and orders roses for his wife.
.
Finally, imagine this:
We’re back in the forest.
The woman loses her mother then strays, pulling herself together in the nick of time. She chooses a prison infirmary over a small clinic; she knows it will bug the hell out of the only parent she has left, so she does it anyway.
The man’s brother takes the gun. He doesn’t shoot it, but it doesn’t matter. The die is cast, the course is set.
And so a few days before her twenty-ninth birthday, the man and the woman meet in the infirmary. She scans his chart, administers his shot, rebuffing any attempts at conversation. That is as far as it will ever go.
Or she might say, looking at his heavily tattooed arm as she draws the needle out, Tattoo looks fresh.
He will say, I’m Michael, by the way.
And the rest of the story will write itself.
-End-
Characters/Pairing: Michael Scofield/Sara Tancredi, mentions of Lincoln Burrows, Veronica Donovan, LJ Burrows, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Tancredi, and Bruce Bennett
Genre/Rating: Het/Mild NC17
Length: ~ 2,900 words
Author's Note: Especially for skybelpb, an unbelievably wonderful woman. I'm so, so glad to have met you in this life. Thanks for everything. *hugs*
Let me tell you a story-or stories, one is rarely enough-of despair and disclosure, of hope and pain, of turns and forks in the road, of the need to flee and to find, the longing to believe, and the possibility of joy. There will be truth within lies, tricks and smoke. I tell you nothing new. They may or may not end to your heart's desire. And they all begin, like so many stories that have been spun since the dawn of words, with this:
A man and a woman.
.
A few days before she turns twenty nine, the woman stands in her house, looks out the window at the world, and makes a wish.
Before that she had been a girl, a good girl, a compassionate, though sheltered, child. Her father was confident and shrewd, a born leader, the center of an ever-expanding circle of influence. Her mother was attentive, sociable-perfect except for one thing, this black dot in a milky stretch of white: a terrible weakness, a dangerous compulsion that they kept hush-hush.
One lonely, interminable summer, her father said, Your mother and I have to take care of something very important. She was whisked away to the beach. When she came back home her mother was arranging flowers at the dining room table. There was the smell of freshly baked bread, and her mother was smiling, a pretty apron around her waist. Come here, sweetie. She broke out into a run and threw herself into her arms.
The girl who was twelve grew up to be a doctor; she never wavered (except perhaps once or twice, because it's true what they say, the apple does not fall far from the tree) but like the other beasts and stains of their immaculate life her recklessness was subdued, scrubbed vigorously away, and at twenty eight she was married to a man with a bright, bright future.
But this is not our man.
Our man never knew his father. The father had been, by all accounts, a wastrel with a wandering eye. The mother had been loving, but was gone too soon. His older brother brought him up, single-handedly it would often seem, and he would do an excellent job. But pushed into the jaws of overwhelming responsibility, with no one to lead by example, this brave, tough brother would lose his way.
Our man was born with a trait very few have, something their mother, from the time they were young, had always seen as a gift instead of a curse. He used it to his advantage; sometimes it felt as though it was all that he had. He was also exceedingly tenacious. The straight arrow to his brother's troubled soul, he hung on for both of them when the other one flagged. He was, finally, the strong instead of the weak one, and he would save what he could.
They pulled together and pressed on, working nights and summers to get by, to get out. Their mother had left them nothing except each other, but it was all they would ever need.
And now he is married, to a woman he met during a trip to Baja. They are a hard-working, fine-looking couple. His brother is married to the love of his life; more than the considerable sum of money in the bank, more than the plush apartment in the quiet, affluent neighborhood he calls home, this is what he's happiest about.
It's a life he's justly earned. On a good day, like today, he sits in his corner office, looks out onto Chicago, feels deeply thankful, and tries to ignore the little voice in his head that longs for something he cannot name. Minutes away, in a big house on a tree-lined street, the woman who is almost twenty nine stands by the window, and gazes unseeingly at the clear ivory afternoon. She might wish for rain, the kind that is pleasantly light; her husband will be home soon, and she would love fifteen minutes between the sheets, the soft melodious drumming of the rain against the roof keeping time to the rhythm of their blood. Or she might wish for a blinding torrent, for her husband to call and say Honey, I'll wait this one out, I will be late, before turning back to the flowers waiting for her attention on the dining room table-impossibly red, painfully conspicuous, and smelling of doom.
The man and the woman will never meet.
.
Or let me tell you a story about a man and woman, only this time the woman who had been a girl who had been twelve came home one day to silence and grief. The house was dark; her mother had left her forever, to come back to the world only in dreams, and suddenly everything else was dark, too. It was as if a fissure had gone through the family left behind; the girl's father turned into a stranger, stepping back and letting go, and she drifted from him, a ship without a sail borne away by the tide.
She figured she could save others, if not her mother, so she became doctor. But like her mother she would fall for that high that was as sweet as the chase, that blissful, delicious escape from the illusion of her well-heeled, perfect life. Years later, she would come upon a marionette tossed on the street, broken and silent-a boy she could have saved, her chance at redemption-but instead of waking from her trance she burrowed deeper into slumber, running, just running away from it all.
Three years later, the man sits in his corner office and considers the magnificent view of Chicago before him, ignoring the soft restless voice in his head. The phone rings. His wife's voice flows to him like honey: Sam and I are visiting her brother in the hospital. Pick me up after work? In the hospital, members of the press mill around the nurses' station. His wife places her hand on his arm as they make their way out. Haven't you heard? The governor's daughter tried to kill herself. No, he had been too busy to check the papers that morning.
She offers to drive. In the car, he looks at the newspaper his wife hands him, at the doctor's photograph on page three. It was taken from her yearbook, with her senior grade quote and all. She looked so happy, he thinks. Such a shame.
.
Better yet, let us return to that twenty-eight-year-old woman, except now she’s in an apartment, it’s nighttime, and she's going, a little frantically, through the bureaus and shelves. To and fro she paces, a slight figure in flight. She lives alone. There are no flowers on the dining room table, no husband in her life. There is also no dental floss in the house.
There is a sharp, colorful oath before she finally grabs her keys.
As for the man, save for the sun and the sand and the cool nights in hammocks swigging cheap beer, the trip to Baja was uneventful. There is no wife. All he has is his older brother, one he is so tired of being the older brother to-tired of footing the bill, of making excuses, of saying, “I don’t know where he is,” when his nephew shows up at his doorstep, searching for someone, something, that both of them have long since lost.
In a 7-Eleven, he scours the shelves hastily for food and drink suitable for a sixteen-year-old-funny how his nephew never drops by and stays for the night when his kitchen is stocked-eager to get back home to the prints on his desk. Tomorrow’s presentation is heavy on his mind; work always is, with nothing else to crowd it out. He makes his choices, grabs them, and in the race to the check-out slams into a woman emerging from Personal Care.
Oof. Dr. Pepper and Oral-B Ultra Floss meet in mid-air and land, hard, in the middle of the alley, as people scramble in all directions, steering clear.
“Oh, hell,” the man exclaims, diving for his loot. He spares the woman a cursory glance. She recovers and straightens, floss in hand. Without another word he turns and leaves.
“Asshole,” the woman hisses at his retreating back.
.
Now we jump back to the start, steel ourselves, and advance. The road crooks and slopes, and we enter a forest of unseen figures and long, undulating shadows. There are debts to be paid, traps to be set. Things aren’t what they seem. There is malice in the undergrowth, and it grows thick, festers and spreads, ensnaring the older brother, slipping a gun in his hand. Take this, it whispers, sickly-sweet into his ear, and everything will go away. But he side-steps, leaving the creepers with jaws for leaves and fangs for buds snapping at empty air. His raven-haired love tells his younger brother what he could not for years, and with a stroke of our man’s hand the debt is paid, the air is cleared.
The woman had gone down a similar path, one where a boy lay bleeding. She snapped awake, delirious. She called someone who said he’d come if she asked; when his figure filled her vision she broke down, crying, begging for release. Take this, he said, we’ll work something out. It was his hand. She grabbed it, her buoy in the middle of her ocean. For a brief moment this gentleman her family had known for years felt like the father she needed, and she started to believe that all would be well again.
Driving home late one night mere days before her birthday, she cries out in alarm as two men rush straight onto her path two blocks from her house. She slams on the brakes; in the glare of her headlights their eyes burn blue. Please help us, one of them gasps. It’s clear they’ve been running. My brother, he’s hurt.
She looks from him to the other figure now kneeling before her car and back again. Even before she nods the man pushes away from the window as though he’d read the tiniest trace of consent on her face. His hand leaves an imprint on the glass. She stares at it; a few seconds more, and it’s gone.
Soon they’re behind her in the car. We’re not going to hurt you. She knows this somehow, but her intuition is not something she entirely trusts, so she’s glad to hear the words, although they’re just that, words-God shows she’s fallen for so much less. In the house she sees to the gunshot wound as best as she can. Thank you. Thank you very much. She answers in figures and logic: blood loss, infection, shock, hospital. No, they’ll take their chances with her. The men exchange looks, entire unspoken conversations passing between them.
She doesn’t ask questions, but later, after his brother finally falls into a morphine-induced sleep, the man answers them anyway: We’re live bait. We’re the easiest way to get to someone. To flush him out.
In the silence of early dawn his voice is rough and deep. A chill travels up her spine. Flush who out? her mind wonders, but she doesn’t ask. Perhaps it’s the silhouette of his body, or the suddenness of him, leaping out at her after years of dispossession. Perhaps it was the longing the morphine brought to life as it passed through her hands. Standing before him her body is screaming for something to fill the cavern it left behind, and she sees that he will do.
He will do.
They will leave in the morning. Everything-the anxious looks, his quiet thankfulness, her skin missing him even before he’s gone-tells her that she will never see them again. She takes what she can. He meets her halfway, with a barely reined-in alacrity. So much consideration when all she wants is to be taken away, to be torn apart. She claws at him, all fingers and mouth. He grabs her hands and holds them together, presses one wrist against the other within his palms, calms her down. He smiles against her lips, her complicit angel. Hold still. Hush-hush.
She’s burning, nothing but molten liquid inside. He enters her and she’s ready, in a flash of heat and sound and smoke. She doesn’t even know his name, or he hers, so she cries out something unfathomable, and he murmurs a secret into her throat, and it’s old and hard and bleak and lush, something she’s always known but never knew she did. The light streaks in faint slivers through the room, illuminating long fingers fisting her hair tracing her mouth stroking her deep, falling on the pale skin of her shoulders, on the arm around her waist pulling her fast to him as he takes her from behind, his palm pressing low on her belly, below her navel, his mouth an uncompromising exploration.
The second time it happens it’s slower, just him slowly rocking into her, vivid eyes studying her face. Afterwards they check on their patient for the tenth time. Spent, she falls asleep. He sits on the edge of the bed and watches her, thinking of words to forgotten songs about wild horses and burning water and the end of the world, fighting the urge to stay just one more day.
They’re gone when she wakes up. She calls in sick to work. It’s a small clinic and they’re seriously understaffed, but she does it, anyway. She looks out the window at the world and does something she hasn’t for years: she makes a wish, as absurd as a small child’s. Everything tells her that she will never see him again, but she does it, anyway.
.
And now. Wind back to early morning. The woman stirs and sees the man watching her from the edge of the bed. Once again she advises him against haste. This time, she wins. Before noon she makes two calls: one to work to say she’s come down with the flu, the other to a family friend, that gentleman who has always been there for her, for additional supplies.
It’s a call she should not have made. On her birthday, a day after the brothers disappear, she comes home to find a stranger in her house, a stranger with a gun. He plies her with questions and various, unspeakable ways of extracting the truth. Each time, her answer is the same. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Her death is one on a long list of consequences the man will carry with him throughout his life. He marries but divorces soon thereafter--an attempt at union that was doomed before it even began. Even in his old age his daughter will catch him standing still, lost in thought, tears filling his eyes. She embraces him with all her might, but even as he lets her, his meager frame shaking in her arms from a lifetime of guilt and regret, she knows that it is not, will never be, enough.
.
Bring the woman back to life. She’s twelve years old again, and there’s something terribly wrong with her mother, something her father will fix. In the meantime she will stay with a family friend, a man she will drive to frustration many, many times in her grown-up life. But for now, he takes her to her room, helps her line up her dolls on her bed--she still likes them, she finds--takes her to the pool for a swim.
Down by the pool a boy sits reading in the shade. Another boy is taking the leaves out of the water with what looks like a rake. He’s my brother, the boy says. She sits beside him and he tells her about his book, something about airplanes. What do you think? he asks. He stares at her too much, is what she thinks. Sorry, the boy replies. They talk until it’s time for them to leave, about airplanes and more airplanes. To her, it feels like time just flew.
A few days before her twenty-ninth birthday the memory of that afternoon suddenly comes to her, and she smiles, her hand sliding over the slight swell of her stomach. Minutes away, in a corner office in a building in downtown Chicago, the man picks up the phone and orders roses for his wife.
.
Finally, imagine this:
We’re back in the forest.
The woman loses her mother then strays, pulling herself together in the nick of time. She chooses a prison infirmary over a small clinic; she knows it will bug the hell out of the only parent she has left, so she does it anyway.
The man’s brother takes the gun. He doesn’t shoot it, but it doesn’t matter. The die is cast, the course is set.
And so a few days before her twenty-ninth birthday, the man and the woman meet in the infirmary. She scans his chart, administers his shot, rebuffing any attempts at conversation. That is as far as it will ever go.
Or she might say, looking at his heavily tattooed arm as she draws the needle out, Tattoo looks fresh.
He will say, I’m Michael, by the way.
And the rest of the story will write itself.
-End-