Call me Anna, she says, hoping they’ll get the vague reference, but they never do, mainly because it’s too obtuse, and partly because nobody really reads Moby Dick these days.

But it matters not, nothing ever does. She wears her hair swept up and her mind swept away. There are the remains of a meal speckled upon her collar and down the front of her top, but people make sure not to comment. It wouldn’t be right, but that’s for later.

First, call her Anna. Heroines always had such exciting names, she mourned, drowning in jealousy that she instantly hated them all. She embraced the plain out of spite, and insisted that people called her by her boring middle name, started work as a librarian, and married a man who was the human embodiment of beige.

He didn’t stand out anymore than she did. He wasn’t tall and wasn’t short, wore glasses in the least imposing way and sometimes spoke too quietly. He hated repeating himself, so told people to forget he said anything at all if they hadn’t heard him the first time.

He was not exciting, barely interesting, hardly living in fact. He wore cotton and tweed but never denim. He admitted to dressing like a geography teacher, belying his youth, but youth fades, and if he so wishes his clothes can stay the same, and more age-appropriate, but for now he looks odd, but only in the most forgettable way. He has a dull name too, but he told you it so quietly that you didn’t hear it, and are too polite to ask him to repeat it.

She wore a silver ring. Gold was so garish, she always thought, and silver was simple, striking, it radiated against her skin, and that was just fine by him, since it was so much cheaper anyway.

So she wore a silver ring, and a grey dress that showed her legs and made her relatives sigh.

She held a lily for each year they had known each other, and her relatives sighed again. They’re flowers of death, her mother insisted, it’s not a good omen for your wedding day, but she insisted that they were her flowers, and she had to carry them. It had to be lilies, it couldn’t be anything else, and silently she counted each petal as she nervously waited. She didn’t mean to upset anyone; she just didn’t think it was a big deal. If they were forcing her into this ridiculous wedding, she would do it her way.

And she did it her way, as she always did. She was silent and dull like her husband, but on her, it was shaped as aloof. She wore green to spark her red hair, and fiered through life as though she was a whin-bush back in the country where she grew up. She still remembers the panic of the ritual in the dry, dry Augusts, how they had to be burned, but what if they spread?

He knew he wasn’t well because of how he sometimes shook. And she would tell him maybe you’re…and he would tell her to stop.
                But maybe it’s…
                and he tells her to stop
                but what if you have…
                stop…


And so she stopped, because things are easier that way.

She had a bad leg, ever since she was a child, but didn’t like telling people. She strode with the pain instead of succumbing to a limp, but was sometimes forced to tears as she struggled out of bed each morning.

Twisted. Twisted it was.

They loved each other as much as people in these stories do, but it is more precise to say that they stayed together. With this ring, tarnished from forgetting to take it off while doing the washing up, and with a lustre only in their minds, they wed each other, and remain devotedly in a life of bills and panic, forevermore, because in truth, that’s the reality, and that’s more than anyone should wish for.

He gently lifts the length of hair she has swept back, and kisses the naked shoulder he exposed. His left hand shakes slightly. He is not well, but neither will mention it. They stare through practically sheer navy curtains as dawn breaks over the city. It appears cold just by looking, as every light is hazy, and every passer-by, though rare at this hour, is wrapped for expeditions to far-off icelands, or possibly the twenty-four hour Iceland round the corner, having run out of cheese and bread for that vital post-pub, pre-hangover cheese on toast. Then dawn becomes day, and they have better things to do than see, and feel.

She sighs. She always sighs. Some think she is born for greater things than this, but really she has enough trouble handling the quiet life she leads. She crosses the stairwell and permits herself a limp, and rubs her back. She tires of this life, as she would tire of any life.

He used to bring her lilies. Now he is not himself, sent home from work because of how unwell he has gotten.
                You’re not well
                she tells him
                I know
                he says, after so long.


He is not well, he is not himself. He repeats himself, and he says thing he did not mean to, things that make no sense, when he stirs in his sleep. He sleeps a lot now. He sleeps and he tells her he is sorry. She doesn’t reply, because she doesn’t know what he could be apologising for, and isn’t sure whether it’s just something he says by accident now.

Now her life is interrupted, not by mundanity but by family. They drop by to help, and never seem to leave. She has the same conversations over and over with each obscure aunt and cousin, so often that she wonders if it is she who is sick.

He’s thin, she sees. She hadn’t realised, but he’s shrinking. Sleeping and fading. It happens, she reminds herself, but it doesn’t make her feel any better.

She helps him eat sometimes, and food spills, as food is wont to do. There are the remains of a meal speckled upon her collar and down the front of her top, but people make sure not to comment. It wouldn’t be right, but they gossip among themselves, and sometimes come to visit her when they are not working, letting her tell them the same stories, again again again.

She wants to hush them. She wants time to herself. She wants time with him.

It has been a good day today. He is aware and talks almost normally to her, rolls his eyes behind the back of his mother, kisses her shoulder as she changes for bed.

She still sleeps in the crook of his arm. It is more delicate now, but full of devotion. One day she knows she will wake up and he won’t, and she tries to prepare herself for it. Death happens, it’s natural, horrible things happen to good people. Yes, he’s young, yes, it’s too soon. But it’s life.

And God forbid you don’t live life.

His eyes are hazy, but still brown. Eyes are usually green in stories like this, she thinks, because green eyes are exotic, and unusual. But his are plain brown, not even claiming hazel for attention. They are brown, and hers are blue, and sometimes hers are crying.

He kisses her hand and looks embarrassed. He doesn’t like what he’s become, and he can’t stop it. It terrifies him but soon he won’t remember it. It terrifies him because soon he won’t remember it. He is a person with a switch, and sometimes he is switched off. He wonders what vegetable he would be, if he were to lapse into a vegetative state. Cucumber, he thinks for some reason, but pictures an aubergine. He knows this is wrong, but is too tired to correct himself, or even to remember how.

Aphasia they say, and it comes and goes. Anna doesn’t think on such things. She turns on a light in the kitchen, then turns it off again. On/off. Like him. He will be here, and then he will not. She tried to prepare herself. She doesn’t think she is doing a very good job. Her mother-in-law walks in to find her turning the light on and off, but doesn’t remark upon it.

Teenagers scream on the street at each other, frolicking in the early morning hours. She lies awake his sleeping arms, turning the ring on her finger. She wants to swallow it, ingest it, anything so it will become part of her for the end of her days, but she knows that it wouldn’t work. All things come to pass. As it were.

And she smells him, on his body, and on the pillows, and on the pages of the books he used to read, they linger and fill her head, envelope her in memory. She brushes dust off the photo frames. Their wedding photos. Their life. She isn’t thirty yet. Neither is he. She buys lilies for herself today, and lays them on his grave.