Oblivion

“Helen.” He held a quivering hand out to her. “You have heard me. And now at last you’ve come. An angel sent to save me from perdition.”

“Edgar, what is the meaning—?”

“My fate rests with you.” He fell to his knees and clutched the skirts of her dress, peering up at her. For a moment, Helen lost her ability to speak, wondering if what she saw could be attributed to the heightening effects of the ether.

Gone were the ghost-gray eyes of the man who’d proposed to her in the cemetery less than two months before, and she now wondered if the spectral gaze he’d claimed to have seen in the mirror that morning could have belonged to his own reflection.

For the eyes that stared up at her now, imploring and full of dread, were indeed as black as night.

Blacker.

1

A Valentine

Dear Varen,

After putting your name on paper, it seems I can hardly hold my pen steady. So this won’t be neat. I’m not good with words like you are, so it won’t be eloquent, either.

Valentine’s Day is this weekend. I’m in English class, and Mr. Swanson wants us to work on composing romantic sonnets. He’s gone over the format twice, but thinking about iambic pentameter and quatrains makes me feel like I’m trying to solve a math word problem. At least, I’m pretty sure my poetry reads like one.

If you were here, I know you’d already be done with yours.

I also know it would be beautiful.

I can see your desk from where I’m sitting. I won’t find you there even if I look, but part of me is always afraid that I will.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s what you wanted. For me to be afraid of you. For everyone to be afraid, so no one would try to get close.

They tell me that I died. They say that I was dead, and I want to tell them I still am. At least that’s how I feel. Because I know where you are and what’s become of you. Because I couldn’t stop it and I couldn’t bring you back. Because Reynolds was right when he told me I couldn’t reach you.

Everything’s broken.

And yet here I am, writing you what must be a Valentine.

Because even though I know I shouldn’t still love you, even though I know that is the last thing I should have room to feel for you, more than anything, I want to tell you I do.

* * *

Isobel lifted her shaking pen from the vein-blue lines of her notebook, wondering how the confession had managed to escape her.

She’d never written like that before, where the words just poured out, unstoppable.

The final line burned into her retinas, echoing a truth that she’d hoped to keep hidden away, locked inside with everything else.

She smacked a hand on the paper, crumpling it.

What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she let go?

Why, when he had let her go?

The lunch bell rang, the noise shredding her already frayed nerves.

“Okay, folks,” Mr. Swanson said, standing from behind his desk, his wooden rolling chair sliding back to bump against the chalk tray. “I’d like to go ahead and collect these today, even if you’re not finished. I’ll hand them back tomorrow, so you’ll have the first few minutes of class to do some revising, and then I’ll grade them over the weekend.”

Everyone got up, papers flapping, and the unanimous flutter in the room reminded Isobel of a flock of birds taking wing.

Tekeli-li . . .

Afraid someone might catch sight of Varen’s name, Isobel ripped her own rumpled paper free and stuffed it into the middle of the notebook.

Glancing up, she saw that Mr. Swanson had moved to the door. Like a ticket taker, he collected papers as her classmates filed into the hall.

“Another reason I should gather these now,” he said, “is the simple fact that many a great work of literature has been lost by remaining tucked haphazardly into the pockets and knapsacks of young, carefree scribes such as yourselves. Wanderlust wayfarers, cavalier bards, wistful wordsmiths—”

“And phat rappers,” Bobby Bailey said as he handed Mr. Swanson his sonnet.

“And portly rappers, why not?” Mr. Swanson conceded with a nod, adding Bobby’s paper to the accumulating stack.

Isobel rose. She tore off the top sheet of her notebook and, gathering her things, kept her head down as she approached the door and its guardian. Handing in the blank paper, she ducked past him into the hall.

“Ah, Miss Lanley,” he called after her, his voice carrying over the rising chatter and banging of lockers.

Flinching, Isobel stopped.

“I see thou hast submitted parchment free of words, and thus error. How very avant-garde,” Mr. Swanson said, talking in that way he sometimes did, like a Shakespeare character who had somehow clawed his way out from the press of musty book pages.