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I will never forget that casserole I had cooked before the phone call. No reason not to eat it. We could not leave until the next day's ferry. I was no heroine pale and toying with my food. I ate. I tasted it— the gravy was rich with onions and the carrots bright but a tang of unreality hung in the air as though an earthquake had shimmied with the town fracturing the foundations of our house which was about to tilt, to slide.
keep fogging on the bus to work and as he slants his body to the north-east wind on Nelson Street watches the Hamburg ferry shove against the swell the small shot of raindrops overwhelms them runs like tears.
He stumbles up the library steps, wipes the lenses with a Humber-coloured handkerchief saying the F-word, so that the tap tap of high heels going down the steps quickens. The specs are back just in time to see a disappearing perm and indignant stocking seams.
After the thank-yous, the good wishes and the kisses after the waving as the car drives away they come indoors, regretful yet relieved at having the house to themselves.
They separate; he goes to his computer. She clears the coffee tray, then sits to enjoy the last cup keeping hot. The satisfying silence seeps through her skin, her mind reviews.
Her cooking turned out well—wine and talk flowed. The theatre visits and the outings too. They'd walked the hills, hoping to see red kites, and he'd been thrilled when two were sighted circling high above.
She strips the guest room beds, hers first then his but as she lifts the sheets—a whisper of his skin. At once she's back to when they danced and danced tight in each other's arms, some thirty years before.
Her stomach knots, and something like hunger makes her legs feel weak and strange. She holds the sheet bunched to her face breathing its scent, wishing away the years.
It started with Aunt Ellen's sperm whale tooth— scored with wooden ships, sails bulging like washday sheets. In the curvy lines of waves whales spout water, flick their tails.
I have others now, showing sailors in the rigging, doll-like couples hand in hand in gardens. A baleen stay busk with cottage, church and castle was once warmed by her skin when he was far away.
I hold them and sense rope-callused hands scratching with a jack knife; the thumb smoothing in lamp-black. A stench of blood and blubber in his nostrils, he gouges an arrow piercing a heart.
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