The Last Handful of Clover - Book 1: The Hereafter

1.19 Fragile as an Eggshell

June 6, 7:10 am

Keith Woo slept deeply the night of June 5, well into the next morning. It was more sleep in one night than the previous three combined, since his body had reached a point where sleep was impossible to avoid. In fact, he slept so deeply that when he awoke, with the morning sunlight already angling through the venetian blinds, for a moment he was unsure of where he was, or even who he was.

The memories didn't come flooding back, like some tide held at bay. It was just that one moment he felt empty, and the next, he realized that what he thought was emptiness was really just grief.

He awoke with his right hand stretched out onto the side of the bed where Richard slept, as if it had been searching the landscape of the mattress during the night.

Richard was not there. The sheets on his side of the bed were rumpled, but unturned. His pillow, untouched. Keith pulled the pillow to him, and could smell a tiny hint of Richard's scent in the yellow cotton. It was a combination of his natural musk, Pert shampoo, and the lavender beard oil that he sometimes used. Keith wondered if he should keep that pillowcase unwashed, or whether the smell of his lost lover in the empty bed would eventually become too painful to endure.

It wasn't unusual for Keith to sleep in their bed alone. They weren't the kind of couple that needed to be together every moment. Richard had often attended academic conferences out of town, while Keith endured a painful visit to his mother in Las Vegas each spring. But waking up alone in this bed now felt different, because Richard wasn't just out there somewhere else in the world. He wasn't visiting his editor in Dallas or speaking at a linguistics conference in New York. Keith could no longer pretend his husband was waking up alone in some hotel room, and that in his sleep, Richard's hand had been searching the unfamiliar mattress for him.

After three days and four nights of grief, Keith felt strangely numb, as if the loss had just made a nest in his body, and settled in to stay.

As he lay in bed, sun streaming through the window, he thought of the little rituals they used to have, especially each morning. Those rituals were simply over now. Like so much else, they had disappeared in a crash of glass and a spray of blood.

Keith half expected the tears to return, as they had so often these past days. But they didn't.

Perhaps the crying is over now, he thought. That, at least, would be a relief.

Rolling away from Richard's side of the bed, he opened his nightstand. In the drawer there was a small notebook. It was the kind you could buy cheap at the University Coop—nothing fancy, just some lined paper, an elastic to hold it closed, and a black ribbon to mark his place. He'd filled many similar notebooks over the years. Writing had always helped to settle his mind and had been the best tonic for stress.

He thumbed through the pages. This one was nearly full. He'd have to buy another when he returned to work at the University Library. The bookstore was on his way.

The Bic four color pen that Keith used for his writing was clipped to the elastic band of the notebook. It was the same kind he had used since high school, and his habit was to write in a different color each day, cycling methodically between the four colors: Black then blue, green then red. Thumbing through the notebook, all the colors made it feel bright and even festive. He paged through long stretches of narrative, punctuated by snatches of poetry. Over the years, the poetry had become more prominent, and although he didn't have any intention of putting it out into the world, he found the writing itself therapeutic. Everyone needed at least one place in their lives that was reserved for themselves alone, and his journal had always been his unique, private place.