Betaen 6.6 1

Typewritten story by an unknown author. Being read by She, somewhere in space.

Excerpt from the “She Chronicles” Written 2459 - 2469

He knew when he went there that she would be there again. The girl with the raven hair. She was standing on the side, on the path. He walked by her and knelt at the first of the three graves. Then he gently laid a tulip on each one. Someone had already taken the ones from the day before. Probably a cheaper way to put flowers on their graves.

“You are not drunk today” she said it calmly, but he could hear the timbre in her voice.

“I don’t have to be”

“What do you mean?”

He stood up and turned in her savagely.

“I don’t have to tell you everything. I don’t have to justify my life to some stupid black haired undergraduate!” He twirled away from her. “Go away and leave me alone. I am not a book”

He stood like that for five minutes, feeling his pain. He knew she was still there. He turned from the headstones and walked past her without speaking.

“Why?” she said it softly.

He kept on walking. Gravel crunched beneath his boots.

“Why???” She screamed it after him “Why???”

He stopped walking and slowly turned. He felt like he was talking to his daughter again, but this girl was much older. She was a woman. She should know better.

“You are making a fool of yourself” he took three steps back towards her “You learn about your aunt from me in a coffeehouse and suddenly you follow me about for over a week and you ask why?” He took another step towards her, and she could smell the sunlight again. “You are not my mother, not my God, and I’m certain you aren’t a whore” he looked past her “don’t act like any of them. Just leave me alone”

“But…” she sobbed, realizing tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“There are no buts” he said, his voice callous, ignoring her pain, too enveloped in his own to feel hers “this is my life. I don’t know who you are. I don’t want to know. I want my life for myself.” He shrugged. The callousness was gone “I don’t know what you see or what you want, but please just leave me alone”

When she looked up, blinking away the tears, he was gone.

What was it about the man that she followed him incessantly? Stalked him? Sat with him at his table, asked him questions in front of the graves of his family? What did she want from him?

She exhaled smoke and rudely stopped out the cigarette in the ashtray. She didn’t even like to smoke. She had affected it with the artistic crowd she used to be with at the university.

At first, she had found him attractive. She always found loners attractive, people with secrets. It had gotten her into trouble before. Then when she had learned he was a poet he became even more attractive. He would be another notch on her love board. She had writers and sculptors and painters. But never a poet. And he had been alone for almost two years. Before that married to a slut that slept with anything that wore pants. He had to be needing it. It shouldn’t be too hard.

But it had been. He was cold and nonchalant, and he didn’t care. She wondered if he even saw her. Saw the woman. Then, when he had said it was not her past, she realized she wanted something else from him. Something more. She didn’t know why. Why him. Why her. But she wanted it from him. Not sex. Love. Understanding. She wanted to know who he was and wanted him to know who she was. That had to be it. The conflicting emotions. The tears. The memories of sunlight slatting through her window. It had to be the explanation. She had felt that way for a professor once. When she had been much younger and much stupider. But that had been an infatuation. This infatuation was different. It smelled different. It tasted different. She was infatuated with a crazy man. That had to be it. That had to be all it was.

It was time she left the village where her aunt lived. Go somewhere else for the month left of her holidays. She had wasted enough time in this stupid little town. Sixteen weeks wasn’t that much if you wanted to see all of Europe. She never knew when it would come up again. She’d wasted almost three weeks here with her aunt. The only claim the small town had a was a pile of rocks that had once been a castle. And a pond. How silly she had been. How very silly.