Atop the desk, within the drawer

And it was lost | A story

In the days after my discovery upon the beach, Mara had laughed. She’d laughed at the fact I’d brought home a rock, with all its dark and obsidian sheen; she’d laughed at my desperation, pleading for her to look and witness its fractal beauty; she’d laughed at my obsession over an object made of stone. But she hadn’t looked at it. Not then. Instead, she’d mocked me for thinking it was anything of worth, that there was value in something so inert. Of all the many rocks along the shore, why this? Why any? she asked, and I tried to answer, tried to show her what I’d failed to describe on the phone, but all she did was avert her eyes and express her anger at the many grains of sand strewn across the kitchen counter. If it’s to remain, I want it out of my sight.

And so it was that it was banished to my study, where I positioned it on my desk beside the banker’s lamp with its brass base and green shade, the kind that emitted a hue such as to impress upon its owner some arcane quality to be had beneath its light. It was, of course, another item Mara hated, claiming it pretentious and garish. Your room of nothing, lit in green, she would say from the door, her shoulder against the frame, a Merlot or Shiraz or some Cabernet of her design encased and kept from her palm by a curvature of glass. Don’t you hate it? And I would say nothing, knowing no words to assuage her mood, my fingers toying with the little switch that dangled from the green shade, waiting for her to walk away. She always would.

After a while it became clear that Mara and I were waging a silent war of the stone. I would leave it on the desk in its rightful place beside the lamp, and then later, after I would arrive home, it would be in the bottom drawer and I would extricate it from its confines and the game would begin anew, ready to be played out once more. We never spoke of it. It just happened. But as the days went on I would feel it; I would begin to feel bad for it, for an object that should not be locked out of sight in the confines of a drawer in the dark, and some days I would retreat home from the office early, hastening my steps as I approached the house and making my priority before all else the study and the drawer and the stone. In those moments, I knew it wasn’t there beside the lamp; the stone, I realised, willed me back. The nag of a desperate lover, the hopelessness of war, the sorrow of time … it was all these things, crawling on my skin to burrow into my heart.

Two days before my world would change, I caught Mara in the act of its moving. I had finished my breakfast and had already said my goodbye, a silent kiss on the cheek a mockery of our love. The world outside was cold, and realising I had forgotten my scarf I retreated back into the house, thinking it best to slip in and out unnoticed, a thief in my own home. Yet when I padded quietly to the doorway of the study, there I saw her. She was staring at it, moving the stone between her hands, holding it up against the window as though to glimpse what might be held within. She was frozen in position, unaware of anything. As I reached for my scarf, all of a sudden Mara broke from her reverie, slamming the stone into the drawer and pushing it shut with a bang that rattled the whole desk, her hand then moving to her mouth in horror. I swivelled silently away, out of the house through the kitchen, but not without my thoughts darting back to the beach, thinking of how I had caught my own sight of something within. I'd never seen that skittering dark buried inside since then. Oh I had tried. Many times I had tried. For minutes and hours I had stared into the stone, turning it between my hands, ever vigilant of its razor edge. By sunlight, by lamplight, it remained elusive, each attempt making me believe that what I had seen on the beach I had imagined. But this, seeing Mara staring at it in her hands…

The day before I found her dead, I came home to find the stone forced as usual into the drawer, except this time there was something there with it: a note, weighted down beneath the rock, two words written on a scrap of paper. Stop it!, was all it said, her handwriting inked with my own pen. I'd screwed it up, placing with childish defiance the stone back atop the desk.

The next morning, I left the house without ever having said goodbye.

To be continued… (here)

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Thank you for reading, dearest reader. This is Part V of And it was lost, a retelling of a story I tried to write some time ago. There are a number of parts to this now, so perhaps it is best if I list them all, should you wish to venture back:

Part 1 > Part 2 > Part 3 > Part 4

Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash