Wilde Stories 2015 by Steve Berman (ed)

Author:Steve Berman (ed)
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: anthology, gay, paranormal, fantasy, post-apocalyptic, adult, SF
ISBN: 9781590212844
Publisher: Lethe Press
Published: 2015-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

As time went by, I heard less and less often from you, too. Again, no surprise. I had been an adventure, catastrophic, the embodiment of loss. Now in your distress, in your mutual distress you and your wife were settling back into old habits of dependence, leaning on each other, looking inward to that emptiness you shared.

If you never actually told me you’d gone back to her in the marital sense, it was only because you didn’t need to. It was written in your voice, more loudly in your silences.

The bed of course was far too wide without you. Sleep was hard to come by anyway, and solitude made those long watches harder to endure. A radio makes for small comfort, mock-company, bodiless and unresponsive voices.

Even so, I used to listen all night long: doze and wake and drowse again, to the thin and constant stream of others’ talking. It was better, marginally, than the great hushed hollow cavern of the dark all unrelieved.

One night, waking, it was something else I heard: or something more, overriding the newsreader’s murmur. There was a low but steady splashing, as though I’d left a tap running in the en-suite. Or as though you were there, perhaps, not left yet, taking a shower.

Of course I rose, I went to see. How not? I thought a tap washer had split, perhaps, or a pipe-joint burst somehow. I thought I had plumbers in my future. I could have lived without it, but at least I knew the men in Maintenance now.

They’d fix this. If I was worrying, it was about my downstairs neighbour’s ceiling…

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