Jack and Jillian
by Deidre Price
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.
