Left and Leaving
He never stops by when she's at home. Not in the average of twenty hours a day she spends in her flat, buried in printouts and photographs. Not in the early morning when the coffee is brewing and the sunlight streams through her kitchen window. He never leaves a trace of the visit, except for sometimes there will be a banana missing from the counter, and maybe some small thing will appear on the table. Post-it notes, trinkets, a pebble from this beach, a flower from that planet.
From anyone else it might seem like courtship, but Sally knows it's not. It's penance, he's apologizing the only way he knows how. Apologizing for what he's done to her, what he does to all of them in the end.
He stays away and she pretends she wants him to. He leaves her to live her life, the life she left him to start rebuilding brick by brick. But they both know it's a lie because she's not living as much as she is dying productively.
UFO sightings, strange occurances, bumps in the night, she's never stopped chasing any of it. She just can't do it with him anymore. She's only one human girl with one human brain but a few obsessive tendencies go a long way. That and the help of one super powered search engine rigged up by Larry, and a certain slightly psychic paper that had been slipped into her coat pocket one day. She did alright, tracking witness reports, talking her way onto crimes scenes, she had binders of photos and notes but in the end that's all it was. Data. Some personal quest for understanding that in the end helped no one.
It's a Friday and Sally comes inside out of the pouring rain, dripping over the linoleum carelessly. Another day, another mysterious death, and it's striking her more than ever just how useless she is. All she does is observe the aftermath. She's not a hero, she's a cryptkeeper of secrets. Her coat gets thrown over the back of the chair, sodden wool pooling muddy rainwater on the floor like fetid tea.
She's too tired to even think about brewing a pot of the real stuff. Nothing left in her to do anything but sit down heavily in her kitchen chair and stare across the bare table to where one less banana sits nestled in the basket.
Somehow her eyes know just where to go, drifting to the front of the refrigerator. To the little lettered magnets that Larry had sent her as a housewarming gift, (it was supposed to be a birthday present but she'd spent her 24th in the library pouring over newspapers from 1935) In the centre of the refrigerator front, a space had been cleared, and a few select words had been placed letter by letter with a surprising patience.
Sally, you're still brilliant.
She laughs a little, and cries a little more but it's okay because no one but her walls can see.