hooftaps

Verity: She’s got a broom in her hands and is sweeping dirt from the lowest stair when he walks past. Seeing him doesn’t surprise her anymore.  When he first went by—years ago now—she felt the shock like lightning in her stomach and in her chest. It was his back that she saw, but she knew him at once by the color of his hair, the deep rust brown that hung past his shoulders, out of style her whole lifetime. The particular motion of his step, always favoring his right leg. An accident when he’d been a child, she assumed, although he never spoke of the past. He was dressed the way he had since the day they’d met, in exquisitely tailored pants and a crisp linen shirt, like the ones she would whiten in the sun, spread out in this very yard where…

drabble: crawl back to: First time I saw her, both of us twelve, I’d never seen such untamed eyes. Other kids said she wouldn’t survive the winter, but I approached anyway. “You can’t have my bunk,” she wheezed when I told her my name. She’d steal from me in our twenties — the ring my parents left me. I let her keep it. She’d sleep with me, feelings ending at skin. Every time should’ve been the last, yet I always crawled back. Now, decades later, her eyes are still cold, but she’s never turned them toward anyone…