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These Secrets Aren't My Truth

Yet Maybe They Are

By Shelby NewsomePublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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These Secrets Aren't My Truth
Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash

When you suggest we peek through the cracked front door to make sure everything is okay, I pause. The cadence of your rushed syllables meets the gossamer from my icy sigh. We are almost home, I think, as I stand next to you on the sidewalk, parallel to a row of houses. Your eyes plead with me, a palpable urgency. I put my hands in my jacket, feel the alcohol warming my insides, release another sigh. It is late, the bar closed, and I want to go home.

You urge me towards the door. A door connected to a house that is not ours on a street where we don’t live. The windows are dark and blurry. The alcohol swirls in my stomach and I think I may become dizzy.

“Hello?” I call out to the open door.

Silence. A chill whips my face. I start to turn but you breeze by me and let yourself in. You shoot me a concerned look. Someone could be hurt. I follow closely behind you because I owe you that much. Because I think of an alternate timeline with you not in it and shudder. I think of all that you don’t know about me and wonder: What would we become if you knew?

The insides are musty in a way that makes me think this house hasn’t been occupied in a while. Maybe a squatter snuck in? You are brushing your fingertips against the mantel when I nudge you towards the door.

An ornate-looking vase tumbles off the mantel and shatters against the wood floor. I want to run to the door, to leave this house and never come back to it again, never walk on this street again. But I am paralyzed.

A long moment passes and no sound responds to the crash. You whisper, “Look!” You point to the shattered vase. Wads of hundred dollar bills are mixed in with the debris. I count twenty bundles.

“We’re rich,” you say. I’m surprised. This reaction isn’t you.

“We can’t take the money,” I say.

I take a seat on the sunken sofa and dream about our bed. I notice a small black notebook laying on the coffee table. There is an intangible pull that leads me to pick up the notebook. A calculated token that would make sense of this night. With caution, I open up the notebook and regret it.

My secrets are scrawled out on the pages in my handwriting. This must be a joke, right? Every confession, every embarrassing mistake from my past is bound within this book. But how? I did not write this. I don’t know this house.

I panic. The bar. You went to dance while I stayed put, my arms drifting on the bar top. My coherence was sliding in and out. Did I speak to an unusual man? Or was he just the bartender? My drink was half empty and then it was full. Half empty, then full. I didn’t question the reappearance act. I didn’t question the man.

I flip through my life to find a note on the last page in handwriting foreign to my own. Show this notebook to who you’re with and the contents of the vase are all yours.

I am hallucinating. That must be it! But I feel your hand on my shoulder, prickling through my jacket.

“What’s that?” you ask.

I hand over the notebook to you. You flip through it and say, “I don’t get it.”

I grab it out of your hands and flip through the pages. They’re blank.

I blink and we are at our house in the living room. We are bracketed by two sofas that face each other. The fluorescence from the overhead light shines on me like I am a suspect. You’re holding a check—from a piece of mail that sat unopened all day on the table in the living room. You repeat, “We’re rich.”

I blink once more before I fall to the floor. I blink again before I sob with relief, holding my hands to my face as my resolution manifests. I am my present self, my past, and my future all tangled together. You are a gleaming light I don’t deserve.

I start divulging all my secrets to you.

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About the Creator

Shelby Newsome

Shelby Newsome is a writer living in Maryland. Her fiction has appeared in Tart Magazine’s newsletter and The Daily Drunk. You can catch up with her on Twitter at @shelbyanewsome and Instagram at @shelby_newsome.

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