The Possessions by Sara Flannery Murphy

Author:Sara Flannery Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-12-27T05:00:00+00:00

I go to his home. It’s dusk. After I left the Damsons’, I was nearly home before I made a wrong turn at an intersection, and then another. I drove in the opposite direction of my own life.

As I enter Patrick’s neighborhood, a deep ease settles around me. I know his neighbors’ homes. The fusty gables on one side, the sterile lawn on the other, treeless and unadorned. And there’s his house. Our house. The enormous front windows stand darkened and bare this evening.

I pull up on the opposite side of the street.

Across the street, a window lights up. Patrick comes into the room, as if walking onto a stage. I know the details that soften his edges. The long lashes that tangle together, his habit of clearing his throat in short coughs. But from this distance, he’s a handsome stranger again. Intimidating, unknowable. I watch him cross the floor, stop next to the drape pull. He turns his head, saying something. He laughs.

Before I can make sense of this, someone else walks into the room.

It’s her. Me. Hair black as an inkblot, pulled back with a tortoiseshell clip. Her long neck and her pastel dress are as shocking to me as if she were dripping wet, stark naked, insects sliding from her lips and weeds trailing her like a bridal train.

I sit back as if I’ve been physically pushed, my mind a hot blank.

Patrick begins to pull the drapes shut over the windows. As the visible wedge of the room shrinks, the woman comes to stand behind him. She clutches a wineglass clumsily. I can see her more clearly from this angle. She’s less beautiful than Sylvia, her face highlighted too heavily with makeup. And she’s shorter, older. An unsatisfying substitute.

Yet there she is, with him. The drapes swing shut, swaying from the momentum. Patrick is hidden from me.

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