Bittersweet

This piece was written for the following prompt:

Consider the many different ways a person can be haunted:

* The haunting of the unfinished conversation — the thing you never said, or the thing that was said to you that can never be unsaid.
* The haunting of a person who is still alive.
* The haunting of the self you abandoned
* The haunting of a place.
* The haunting of the body a person used to have — before the illness, the accident, the surgery.
* The haunting of the life a woman didn’t choose.
* The haunting of inherited trauma.
* The haunting of a belief one can no longer hold.
* The haunting of joy — the summer you were twenty-two, and everything was possible, the early days of a love before it got complicated.
* The haunting of the thing he saw that he cannot unsee — an act of violence, a moment of cruelty.​

Write a 500-word fictional story about a haunting.

Bittersweet

I spilled half of my smoothie onto my mechanical keyboard this morning. The puddle was the size of a dinner plate, and rapidly expanded toward the edge of my desk. A flurry of curses left my mouth as I flipped the keyboard upside down and, careful not to get more smoothie on the floor, gingerly deposited it on top of the towel I heaped by the hamper last night. I would determine the damage after I dealt with the mess.

You often come to mind whenever I break a glass or spill a drink. It's a bittersweet association compared to recollecting favourites like red velvet cake or your iced coffee order. Isn't it funny— Funny, ha-ha? Funny, sad? Funny, weird— how we can never anticipate the impression we'll leave on others, or that which they'll leave on us?

Something confused and hurt crawled out of the fissure hewn by your departure. It has followed me for years, staggering along in the periphery until I began to understand what this lingering salience to your pain really meant. A Wire Mother left impressions in the very teeth of you, reinforcing false smiles until the voice in your skull belonged to her.

My smoothie wasn't even that good. My grocery list was a foot long; I was missing vital ingredients, and what I threw together was gritty and had too much banana. With a few fistfuls of paper towel, I slid the puddle of smoothie off my desk and into yesterday's popcorn bowl. My notebook, a costume wig, and the curtain four feet away were caught in the crossfire; I cleaned those up too.

The whole thing took ten minutes. No one yelled. My self-worth was unmarred.

Since I'll never know whether time healed your wounds, I would offer a warm, damp cloth unto this creature, amalgamated by woes, so that I may gently clean from its face the deep scores left by Wire Mother's girding grasp. Time has made this creature easier to hold, ever small, shaking and new, crumpled by yearning and embedded with shame. Still held in my mind more kindly than how you once held yourself.

A seeping mess of my own remained, from shift key to shift key, and spacebar to T. I gathered the necessary tools from the depths of my desk drawer, and assumed the role of Wizard Dentist pulling teeth from a Mimic. Despite the untold rotten stories I excised from its maw, the hand abetting change still brought about an addled bite. I cannot blame the creature for retreating before more fruitful wisdoms were enrooted in their place.

This creature is only an echo of you, contained within the timespace we knew one another. I've made better choices with the lessons you taught me, and accepted what lingers as a gift and a teacher. Even when the remnants are involuted and tricky. The power I wield metaphorizing my grief is given shape by words typed on the keyboard I cleaned.

~*~

Thank you for reading!  

Rooney

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