[4] Jack and Jillian

Jack and Jillian
by Deidre Price

When he walked, he wandered. It was impossible to separate the two. Often, Jack had found himself in crowds gathered in places he did not recognize. As time passed, he would pass with it, within it. Margins had begun to blur even more frequently in recent days, which led to the repeated experience of finding himself again and again.

It had been seven hundred eighty-three days since his wife miscarried their baby, and that made seven hundred eighty-two days since the morning he woke up to a note instead of Jillian beside him. In it, she wrote that the pregnancy had afforded her a vision of what the days ahead might be like with him, so permanent. It was only in the certainty of this pregnancy that she was finally certain about him. She could never have stayed, but now she had an explanation for leaving, and that made it easy enough to do.

He had always hated the home. He loved it only because she was in it. When she left it, he left, too. It sat, this abandoned, warehouse filled with memorabilia of a time no one wanted to remember. Many days, he sat the same.