Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever by Phoenix Sullivan Read Free Book Online Page B

picture her before him, to imagine how it might have been. He wonders why she didn’t say anything about him spending time away, working on the car, chasing parts across Europe. Or maybe she did, and he just didn’t hear it. Didn’t want to hear it.
    The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
    The seafront is busy. People flow around him, into him sometimes, sorry, sorry, then on, huddled against the wind and clinging to one another as if they were falling, tumbling down the street. Then, in the polished glass of a shop front, he sees her. Just for an instant, behind him, looking right at him. Wide brown eyes, dark hair moving in the wind. He turns, looks, but sees behind him only the promenade and the greying sea. He looks back at the window, but is confronted only by his own reflection, standing ghost-like behind the glass. He looks again, but there’s nothing.
    He buys fish and chips, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper, and returns to the car. When he gets there, on the driver’s side window he sees a face. Not a real face; a cartoonish approximation of dots and curves, as traced in breath with a finger. She drew something like it on the bathroom mirror once, so that in the mornings, when he got out of the shower, he’d have a smile to cheer him up. It’s a sweet gesture, and he doesn’t really mind that it’s slightly distracting to have one on a car window. He doesn’t remember it being there before.
    He lays out clothes for her every night before he goes to bed now, and sometime the next day they are always gone. He finds them eventually, days later, in the washing basket, so he washes them for her and hangs them in the wardrobe. He replenishes the feminine toiletries as they dwindle in the bathroom. He has taken to cooking two meals in the evening.
    He doesn’t like looking at himself in the mirror any more. The reflection that stares back at him with those sagging eyes is a lie. The images in the old photographs are the real him, caught in an intangible past. The images are the real her.
    He comes to the workshop after hours now, to rebuild the car. To be away from Terry and Craig, though he’s not sure why.
    It’s finished now, the car. The parts all installed. He’s got the engine working. He’s polished the paintwork, and the mirrors and the windows. He’s vacuumed the seats. Dusted the dashboard. He’s filled the tanks with oil, brake fluid, petrol. It gleams, frozen and impenetrable.
    Except it isn’t finished. The leather at the side of the passenger seat is cracked and thin. The rear bumper is pitted with coppery blooms of rust. Already the perfection is crumbling.
    It isn’t finished. It’ll never be finished.
    ~~~
     
    It’s a Saturday, and he’s in the High Street, on his way to the supermarket. He sees Craig coming the other way, with his wife. She’s pushing a pushchair with a young child in it. He smiles at them, but they don’t respond. He waves, but still they don’t react. He’s certain they haven’t missed him, certain they aren’t deliberately snubbing him. It’s more that they looked right through him, as though he were transparent. As though there were only blank space where he was standing.
    It’s a Wednesday, and he’s at the crematorium. It’s the anniversary of her death. He’s come here alone, but there are other mourners here, and they collect in drifts, like black snow. None of them is here for her. He places the bunch of fresh dahlias in the vase by the plaque and steps back to admire them. He knows they’re what she would have wanted, because her diary told him so. She told him so.
    Scattered people fill the streets on the way back from the crematorium, walking in ones and twos and threes. Some of them look at him as he passes in his ash-coloured suit and black tie, a man dressed to meet the dead, and he suspects them of talking about him, quietly plotting condolences and excuses.
    He hears someone fall into step with him. High-heeled shoes, clapping along