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How it Ended


(a Short Story, 21/5/11)

...He started keeping tabs on her
as she took daily walks through the city
meeting with strangers who she'd befriended.
He had no idea what she saw in them,
being that they were, on the whole, as unremarkable
as suits in an office building.
He watched her as she caught the 9.50 bus to everywhere,
fidgeted incessantly,
made hateful eyes at the morally-spoild Chairman Meow t-shirt-sporting twenty-something degenerate
in the back seat.
Dirty and worn was that look she gave, as if in direct response
to the dictators eternally shameless and unfaltering stare.
He sometimes admired her showy displays of what she would call Integrity
but laughed with the rest when she tripped on the kerb getting off.

He followed her to various employment agencies
and then to the park
where he pretended to watch cormorants
as she filled out the many application forms
and then left them on a bench.
He thought she must've simply liked how she looked on paper,
the way some people spend an hour just looking in the mirror.

As the sun set at th end of an evening in June,
he called it a Day,
it was too hot to be around centrally heated buildings
and her new James Joyce reading boyfriend had caught him fumbling in th phonebox by her house more than once now.
No more small, bleached white envelopes containing his fingernail clippings
were sent.
and he left North, on a train, shortly after.



JJ's Appreciation Society