The rain drowned asphalt, tyres, sound, and time. She hadn’t said a word since they left the gala. Aftertaste of sherry and hors d’oeuvres remained, along with the echo of banter from men whose neckties choked their heads like Polish sausages. To catch her eye, he took his own from what space of road the headlights deigned to show, but she continued staring at the darkness through the undulating wash, her creams and powders no defence against the years that tugged her jowls.   

“Do you recognize this place?” he asked her.

“You must’ve taken a wrong turn.”

She’d told him once, when they were newlyweds, of the time she took a wrong turn on her bicycle and found herself in a sunless valley where a solitary crone stooped gathering chrysanthemums. When asked, the old woman named a place she never found on any map and would never dare to search for.

He wiped a sleeve across the front door glass. “It’s like a swamp out there.”

She gave a little cry and pointed to the Navi screen. “The arrow isn’t moving. It must’ve stopped a while ago.”

He groaned and slowed to search for a patch of undrowned shoulder. “We’ll have to backtrack,” he said, stopping the car on what he thought was asphalt. The tyres sank—he slammed the gear into reverse—the wheels screamed in agony.

Her jaded eyes followed him outside, followed the unfurling of his umbrella and his trudge around car. 

“We’re stuck.” He climbed back in, muddying the upholstery and snatching his phone. All bars were down. “Where the hell can we be that there’s no reception?”

She stared at him with what he took for bemusement.

“I’ll walk a little ways,” he said. “See if I can find a landmark. Keep the engine off. Last thing we need is for the battery to die.”

Caught in the closing door, defeated by the downpour, was what sounded like a plea.

He kept to what he thought was shoulder, his wingtips plunging into the mud. Violating gravity, vindictive streams climbed up into his umbrella. Not a single road sign. No glow of other headlights in the fog. He turned toward where he might’ve discerned his car’s location, had he given her leave to keep a light on.

Her voice called out for him.

“I’m here! Give me a minute!” He freed his legs and slogged in her direction. Her voice turned faint and seemed to migrate, smothered in the batter and slosh. He stumbled forward. Sank deeper in the mire.

Something knocked against his shin. Something heavy. Something flimsy.

He reached down and yanked on weighted denim. A small, hard object sat in what might have been a pocket. With a squeeze he felt the key.

The world tottered from its axis.

“Honey?” he shouted. “Can you hear me?”

No answer came but unabating rain.

He bent again and groped as though bewitched. The mud was like the clay at the edge of that creek where, as a child, he’d dug beside his brother, trying to stop the current’s flow. He’d dug with fury, flinging mud toward his brother’s face, his brother begging him to stop.

His hands had found the box.

Despite the inundation, the key still turned. Dry inside, the box held nothing but the tiny flash drive wrapped in its slip of paper, the word backup scrawled in his own hand. By the flashlight from his phone, he read the note addressed to him:

I return to you what’s yours.

Lorie.

Memories were spindles, bobbing, spindly. An intern in the office? He’d flirted presidentially, accusations never flowing homeward to his wife. Now a waterlogged disgrace, he reeked of sepsis. He stuffed the note into his jacket, parried with the tiny beam and found it thwarted. He took some steps in each direction, pacing further with each foray, till the surface no longer yielded beneath his soles. He struggled onward where the filth grew shallow and forced himself back on the road.

A warmish glow ahead. A vaguely squarish shape. Light from the windows. The passenger’s side door agape. The engine purring. Spangled rain on the vacant patent leather seats.

He howled her name till it tore his throat. He raced around the car in widening circles. Beyond the glow he blundered back into the mud. He spun and staggered toward the car. Shut himself inside. Gunned it in reverse. Rubber shrieked and grated. He leapt out cursing, slammed the door, marched back along the road on which they’d come. His heels, toes and bunions chafed inside his shoes until all flesh seemed worn away. At intervals he wiped his phone, then thrust it back into this pocket.

Sometime in the small hours, one bar showed. Two.

The policeman answered on the first ring.

When at last the unapologetic workman arrived, the hitching took so long there was barely time to chastise the police for their negligence. The officers tried to fake it with decorum and apologies, but he had no doubt they’d seen his face when he’d been mayor. He saw right through their feeble ruse of sympathy. As he basted in the back seat, they drove him smirking over miles of roads he’d helped to build.

At dawn they left him at his gate.

Hot water deliquesced his neurons. His suit was left to putrefy outside the shower. He could amend the missing persons report, he recalled the policemen telling him. Whence could have come such enmity? The cysts of ignorance that erupted chanting in the streets—would he put it past them to abduct the former mayor’s wife?

White and rugose fingers fumbled with the USB. Power on. Any virus scan would probably be useless, when one recalled the likes of Stuxnet.

Disconnect from every network.

The finder burst with files labelled with alphanumeric codes, all clipped from dated emails, matryoshka nested labyrinths, anfractuous, fractured. He rubbed his temples, recognizing nothing.

When it was light, he shaved and donned a different suit, then called for a taxi to his office. He set his assistant’s team to work on analysing the flash drive.

At noon his assistant crept back in, bemused but tepid. “It might be better not to involve the police.”  

“I’ve already filed a report.”

“It might be better not to take it further. Do you remember who Lorie was?”

“Not in the slightest.”

The assistant shifted his weight from foot to foot but added no excuses.

“Give me back the USB.”

For the remainder of the day, he rifled through his drives and shelves and filing cabinets, his inbox set to ping with each arriving message.

In the bottom of the back of one old musty shoebox, he unearthed Lorie’s resume.

A face he should have known. It looked like so many others. A chronology of hopeful girls in perennial procession, revolving through the doors and foyer. Sweet-smelling vernal flora plucked and then ignored or cast aside with their more wilted sisters. A trace of latent sadness frozen in its frame stared at him from the corner, preserved before it subsumed by time, the smile still a girl’s before her wheels misrolled her into sunless valleys.

His imagination failed, the old crone’s face dissolving in the maelstrom of his weasel-toothed constituents. He saw his brother at the water’s edge. The flying scattered soil. He’d figured out what “blackmail” meant and later found those broken fragments in the mud. A honeymoon in Morocco: cream charmeuse and damask across lapels of velvet. The sinking sun behind the palms and minarets. Her fingers laced through his, the airless heat of markets and the corridors of stone where fathers, sons and brothers coolly shaped the clay. The coyly smiling timid lady proffering the vessels, her careless fringe escaping her hijab. They set the price. She seemed at once to sense he’d never make the purchase.

His inbox chimed.

Lorie had written: You probably don’t remember me, but I have to let you know it’s over between you and your wife.

He fired back a single line. What have you done with her?

Don’t do anything rash. And take your assistant’s advice not to go to the police.

Surveillance is dead easy, Lorie.

How do you know I didn’t make a copy of that USB before I returned it?

What the hell is on it?

Nothing you don’t already know.

He howled for his assistant. “Have a hacker track these emails! Have the cops go root her out wherever she’s hiding!”

He nursed a paper cup and fished in his drawer for codeine. The panicle of boffins congregated. His ears went hot. He inhaled the stew of garbled jargon until he couldn’t bear it. Stumbled into too-clear night. Hailed a cab at the corner. All along the downtown streets, the shadows parted for his boondoggles. He saw the teethless sneers of lobbyists, the ghosts of picket lines and broken picket fences. Parcelled bills and buildings made of postage stamps. The streetlamps in their haloes blurred. At his gate, the porch light and the path and hedges receded from his presence, blistered, bleeding. He stretched out on his bed still in his wingtips. Sleep should have mercifully extinguished him. Instead, it replayed the day he’d bought the jars, taunted him awake, and forced him down the corridor to that neglected wing.

Through bare French doors the moonlight bathed the shelves. The jars sat undisturbed: new but for the gentle grace of dust atop their lids.

The landline rang, redirected from his smartphone.

“The sender of those emails came forward voluntarily,” the assistant said. “She asked to schedule a meeting with you face to face. She won’t talk to us. Her VPNs keep switching. We’ll never track her down.”

“Let her have my number.”

He closed his eyes and saw the corpses of his parents and tried in vain to recall when he’d last spoken to his brother. He saw the earth below his feet avulsed and turning, his future an unbroken fall into the darkness.

He woke with a jolt. Shuffled back to bed. The image of the jars remained.

In the morning light he returned to that neglected wing, took each clay vessel from the shelf in turn. Turned it in his hands.

Lorie called sometime in the morning—or perhaps he only dreamed she did. He saw the restaurant as he entered, saw her rise from her seat with a face like stillest water, saw his hand around her wrist, and saw her watch the twisting of her flesh with pure and placid melancholy.   

He heard her say, “It’s over between you two.” He saw it in his power to seize her, to crush her in his hands, and saw the reflection of his own violence in her eyes as she stared back with neither threat nor malice, but with the knowledge that he had already lost.

He sank to his haunches in the echo of her gaze and wept, the vessel cradled in his arms. The sky burned and bled till all that remained was moonlight. He threw open the doors and hurled the jar he’d known his wife to love the best, and closed the doors before he heard it shatter. With a single shove he drove the rest of her collection from its shelves to land in chaos, damaged but unbroken, on the carpet.

Morning touched his eyes. Birds sang the hymns of early spring. In the distance roared the turning of the early engines fired by the keys of their commuters.

He descended the stairs, walked out the door, and followed the path along the dew-drenched garden to the driveway in front, where the vessel lay in shards, and followed the traces of its wreckage to the point of shatter.

And she was there, of course. Her face like clay. Her jaded eyes fixed steadily, through weary tears, on all the scattered fragments.

About the Author:

Originally from the eastern United States, Tremain Xenos makes his home in a crumbling shack between the rice paddies in Japan’s smallest and least productive prefecture. Some of his recent stories have appeared in such places as The Heduan Review, Rivanna Review and Channel Magazine.

*Feature image by Pete Bread on Unsplash