A Length of Time

I thought of her often. I smiled, remembering the radiant gleam of her teeth and the gentle part of her lips. When she laughed, I heard it echo between my ears like a symphony of violins. Her hips curved delicately beneath her evening dresses, and her skin was soft to my touch. She’d smile as I looked her in the eyes and laugh when I tripped over my untied shoelace.

Then I’d wake up. The sunlight that filled my dreams was gone the instant she dissolved into morning. The new tuxedo gathered dust in my closet; the countless wedding cards lay scattered in the corner of my bedroom. The sun wasn’t as bright this early in the day, and the world around me lacked its usual luster.

Ma tried to tell me it was all for the best. Wouldn’t it be better for me if it was ended now, rather than three years down the road? I couldn’t believe that. Alice had told me she loved me, and that couldn’t have been a lie.

Month two.

Pa called me up yesterday evening. They still hadn’t received the check they gave her the day of her bridal shower. Check? What check? What made a damn check so important when she was still gone? “She’s an enchantress, Nick. That woman has brought you nothing but grief. She toyed with your affections and then left you like yesterday’s newspaper!”

“You don’t know that,” I said aloud. Maybe she didn’t return the check because we still had a chance. I had to work for her affections again. I had to somehow prove that I was a worthy enough man to be called her husband.

I hopped from my seat and pulled on my jacket. My hands trembled as I buttoned it up to my neck and laced up my shoes. I double-knotted them and pulled at the loop a couple times to loosen them. I fumbled for my wallet as I dug through the mound of clothes in the corner of my closet. I hoped it might lay hidden in the back pocket of a pair of jeans.

Shoes, coat, wallet…surely I’m missing something. It thought it could hide from me, but I found it: the prim black bow tie she’d got me for my birthday last year. She’d give me a big kiss and tug at it when I wore it. I looped it around my collar, realizing after that I was wearing a tee shirt. Quick as my fingers could move, they were shaking worse than a rattlesnake’s rattler now, I unbuttoned the jacket and tore off the shirt. My closet held one solitary suit shirt hanging like a lone lamp light on a dreary night.

I yanked the shirt from the hanger and shrugged it on. Before I’d completed all the buttons, a small yellow piece of parchment fell from the pen pocket. My shirt still half-open, I bent to read the paper.

“Son, we’re here if you ever need us. We’ve had our share of hard times, too. We love you. –Dad and Mom”

I ran my fingers across the page and stopped on the ‘love’ written in Dad’s scrawled doctor’s script. I neatly folded up the note and returned it to its warm, pocketed home. Gingerly I buttoned the rest of the shirt and tucked it into my jeans. The bow tie fit neatly around my neck.

“She took our money and ran, son, it had nothing to do with you,” my father’s voice echoed in my head as if he were in the room with me.

“It has everything to do with me!” I yelled back at the ceiling. I kicked the chair from underneath the table and watched until it thumped uneventfully on the carpet. I eyed the cell phone on the counter and saw the message light blinking. Mom had called again while I was sleeping.

I reached for the device, but drew my hand back and curled it into a fist. I strode to the mirror and combed through my hair once or thrice. The one cowlick on the back of my head refused to stay down. I pressed the stubborn hair with my fingertips, and eventually just tossed the comb at the mirror and let it fall.

Alice would play with my cowlick when we were together. She’d twirl her fingers through my hair and giggle a little whenever I attempted to tame the small beast. The way her lips moved when the chorus spoke through them was similar to the way a rose might open mid-spring.

I pulled on the jacket again, this time noticing how large it seemed to be compared to just a few weeks ago. Alice would be overjoyed to see me. She’ll see me dressed as I am: bow tie on my neck and cowlick up for her to see, and smile when I present her with flowers, damn; I have to buy flowers. I’ll draw her into a kiss, feel the smooth skin of her shoulders and the gentle curves of her waist, and things would be alright.

Things would be alright.


My closet was empty save for a few dry-cleaned business shirts. I couldn’t bring myself to scrap the wedding cards, so I instead stored them in a locked chest with my bow-tie and our engagement picture. The chest served as a small coffee table in my sitting room, adorned with some ornate tablecloth my mother had purchased. I kept the key on my person, tied to a thin string I wrapped around my belt buckle. I changed the string often, one inch more for each passing month I waited for her.

I spent more time at the park than at my house. John offered an invitation to go out for drinks a few nights a week after our day-long business seminars, but I always turned him down. After a few weeks, he stopped asking. I tossed the key up into the air when the evenings grew too long and let the small brass tink on the sidewalk. A couple would pass by me, holding hands and whispering to each other with smiles on their faces as they let the evening roll on slowly.

I could see my face in his and Alice’s in hers. I could feel the soft dimple Alice’s palm made between her thumb and index finger and I could smell the faint honeysuckle of her perfume in the hollow of her neck. My teeth had a small gap between the middle two incisors and I sometimes pretended to serenade her with song conducted by my gap-pipes and nose-trumpet.

“You really are silly, aren’t you, Nick?” she asked from behind her hand. She’d cover her mouth to conceal the gap between her own teeth when she laughed. I reached for her hand and kissed her fingertips. She smiled for real this time and sent a plume of fire through my veins.

I memorized that gap, and could still see her smile.

The smiling park couple paused near me to enjoy the fountain. She fished a coin from her pocket and held it close to her heart. With a kiss to her husband, and then to the coin, she tossed it into the bubbling water. The man laughed at the silly gesture. He batted his eyes at the fountain and pretended to swoon in an imitation. His wife laughed and shoved him playfully.

I looked away from them, seeing Alice’s smiling face clearly in my memory.

“Do you remember, Alice, when I didn’t even have to try to make you laugh?”

She shook her head with tears in her eyes and slender arms wrapped around her trembling torso. She tapped her fingernails against her thumbnail and bit her lip. Without another word, she turned from me, smothering my one lamp of hope, and reached for his arm. He glanced back at me with narrowed eyes, then back at her with a furrowed brow, then back at me again with a glower.

I fingered the key on my belt as they walked away.

One inch.

Two inches.

Three inches.

Four inches.

I told Pa what happened over dinner. He said little, but looked at me with his eyes over the top of his glasses and grasped my shoulder. He squeezed and held it firm. Some ten minutes had to have passed this way, until he finally let me go and went to help Ma with the dishes.

That night, after I left, Pa cancelled the check.

My string measured six inches.


The Saturday crept on as I read near my fountain. “Time heals all wounds,” I read. I fingered my key on its string and counted eighteen inches. I hurled the key from me and listened with a guilty pleasure as it clinked on the sidewalk. I tried to continue reading, but the image of the sailing string filled my thoughts. I came to this park. I reflected. I’d tell myself that every day I threw the key I could forget her, but I couldn’t just leave her memory behind. Every night I retrieved it before going home.

“What do you carry around that key for?” a woman asked passing by on her daily run.

I put down my book looked upon the face of the woman who broke the usual routine of my afternoon.  

She ran every evening in long pants and a loose hoodie with the words “Walk for Life” printed on it in the gap of a pink breast cancer ribbon.  The hair not pulled back into her ponytail either stuck to her forehead with a slight gleam or blew about her head in rhythm with the light breeze of the park. She handed me the small piece of brass she’d filched on her way over.

I reached for it; my fingers brushed the tip of the metal. “Thanks.”

She pulled it back and ran her fingers down the length of the string. “This can’t be some kind of necklace.” She ran her fingers slowly down the continuous length of string until she touched the key. My skin bristled and my heart pumped liquid venom through my veins as she ran her fingers over the key’s ridges. “And it’s too pretty to just be your house key,” she said aloud. She unlatched a chain link bracelet from her wrist and held it up to the string with a narrowed eye.

“Can I have that back, please?” I asked. Bile began to well in my stomach.

She clasped the key in her hand and brought it near her cheek. The rising bile would soon threaten the safety of my other organs. “I don’t know. I’ve seen you throw it away every day for the past year. I keep thinking you’re just going to leave it there, and I’ll see it in the same spot each day, but it moves. If it’s something you need someone else to get rid of, perhaps I can help you out with that,” she offered.

I held my hand out, palm up and sweaty. She pulled at her collar and smoothed her hair a bit with her free hand. The hairs that plastered to her forehead now slicked back with the rest of her hair.

“You’re pretty well dressed for a park bum, what do you do here every day, anyway?” she asked. I didn’t respond. “You know, life can suck if you don’t let yourself really stop and see how blessed you really are.” She clasped the key in her palm and then opened it to reveal my key and her bracelet side by side. “Memories and wounds of times we’d like to forget,” she explained. My hand hadn’t moved. I shook with the effort of keeping my body still.

She ran her finger down the length of the string again. She pocketed the chain links, coiled the string around the key, and held her hand over mine. She was short, but she bent down so her eyes met my own. They were soft as the silk bed sheets Alice wanted to own and blue as the dark clouds of an oncoming rain. Alice’s eyes reflected the clear beauty of the blue sky, and this woman’s accentuated the ugliness of the oncoming storm. “Eighteen inches,” she told me as she placed the key back into my awaiting hand. She touched her middle finger to the palm of my hand, held it there but a moment, and pulled away. Her touch was as soft as the delicate skin that covered Alice’s back, but her skin was rougher than that pleasant sensation.

“Diana,” she offered and then looked down at a watch on her wrist. She glanced back up at her running route and tried to offer me a thin smile. She turned to resume her jog.

“Nick,” I answered quietly, and she looked back with a grin.

“Nick,” Diana repeated, seeming to taste the word on her tongue like one might sample a new wine. “Eighteen is one and a half years,” she told me. “Maybe I’ll talk to you again before you get another inch on there.” She clasped her bracelet back on her wrist and left me to my solitude.

I watched Diana’s legs move methodically over the sidewalk as she ran. She took deep breaths and even strides, and she glided across the pavement like a skater over ice.

That night, I stared at the chest in the middle of the room. I exchanged the key between my hands and let it dangle from the end of the string for a bit when I missed my palm.

“She’s moved on, Nick, and here you are still sitting in the dark of your apartment staring at the decrepit memories of times that never were and never will be!” Pa yelled at me. His hand struck the wall and his ring thumped against the drywall. Ma yelped and grabbed at her chest. Pa slipped his arm around her and apologized before returning his attention to me. He pointed a finger. “She’s a flirt and is nothing better than a mistress for a fellow who’ll give her attention.”
“She’s not like that, Pa,” I pleaded with him. “Alice is kind, smart, and beautiful.”
“Smart enough to steal your heart and lock it away in this forsaken box!” he argued. “Give me the key.”

I imagined Alice’s smiling face on our engagement picture.

“You won’t even let yourself look at another woman, Nick! That woman didn’t deserve the flack you just gave her simply for being a female with an interest in you! I don’t want to judge, but I’m worried about you,” John chastised me after our latest sales pitch.

“You don’t need to be,” I retored, fingering the key in my pocket.

John grimaced, sighed, and turned away. “Alice never deserved a guy like you,” he muttered as he walked off.

I took a step closer to the chest and faltered. Closing my eyes I turned violently from the chest and thrust the key as far from me as I could. It hit the window and the string was caught in the gap between the panes. As the key swung on its noose, I heard a rhythmic clink each time it struck the pane.

I ripped the tablecloth from the chest and heaved the wooden artifact to the door. The old chest groaned with the pressure, but eventually yielded to my urging. I approached the door and shoved it over the lip; the chest glided smoothly to the apartment steps.

I imagined the key still swinging on its string on the window pane. With each resounding clink, I shoved harder.

The chest toppled down the steps. It cartwheeled down each individual stair to the first floor. With a resounding crash, the chest shattered into a mess of splintered wood and parchement. Cards and clothing lay smashed beneath the pieces. The solitary picture I’d placed inside was caught by a light breeze. The photograph rose with the updraft, almost as if it would return to haunt me, and then fluttered away before I could run for it.  I shoved it down the apartment steps and watched it shatter as it hit the base of the staircase. Cards and clothing lay smashed beneath the wood, and the solitary picture I’d placed inside fluttered away with an updraft of wind.

She wasn’t coming back. Alice’s kisses were enjoyed by another man, and her curves caressed by another hand. Alice’s laugh wouldn’t play music for my ears and her smile would never again be because of me.

I slept.

One month passed.

Diana stopped more frequently as she ran, and would talk with me for increasing amounts of time. I once asked her why she would even have stopped to talk to me. She had smiled and held up her wrist. “I’ve been in remission for three years now. Each link on this bracelet is a month longer I’ve had to live.” Life was hard—beyond her control.  “You always looked so sad,” she mused. “I thought, maybe you just needed someone to stir things up in your life.”

I went for a drink with John one night. He mused about his troubled with finances and the triumphs of his children. As he spoke to me of his wife, I somehow envisioned Diana’s flushed face and half smile.

I smiled at the female bartender and tipped her well for my drink. John clapped me on the back and laughed. “Finally showing the lovely ladies some well-deserved attention, eh?”

I shook my head. “She just looked a little sad, that’s all.”

“Sad is it?” he paused and took a swig of his drink. “Perhaps we all are a bit on the inside.”

A week later, Diana was late in her run. “You didn’t throw your key today,” she commented as she stopped. I offered out my fist with my knuckles aimed toward the sky. Diana held out her own open palm. I dropped the key there and let my hand rest on top of hers. Diana smiled, her flushed cheeks darkening even more. Her eyes became little half moons. Her fingers curled around mine for a moment until she pulled her hand away. Her touch was soft like one afraid to break something, yet rough as if she’d been broken too.

“I thought you might want to have it,” I told her.

Diana held the key with its string, eighteen inches long. She wrapped the string once around her wrist and pored over the key’s string. She pulled a Swiss army knife from the mid-section of her hoodie and lined it up with her mark precisely five inches from the end. She sliced the piece off and threw it to the ground.

Diana eyeballed the length of the string again and seemed satisfied with the changes. She handed the key back to me with the string wrapped around the brass.

“Thirteen. That makes one year and one month since I first saw you gazing out at us common folk by the fountain,” she told me with her whimsical grin. She clasped her hand around my own and smiled, revealing a set of small, pearled teeth.

“Would you like to make it longer?” I asked of an unknown volition. My palms sweat and my ears burned. That dastardly cowlick on the back of my head had to be sticking up like a scarecrow in a field of pumpkins.

Diana tucked the wet hairs behind her head and turned an even deeper shade of crimson. She pulled at her hoodie and extended her legs. “You’d want to get to know all of this?” she asked, pulling at the drenched fabric and shaking her head so that her hair flew in every direction. With hair blown about her, she looked more like a goddess marching to war than a human being.

“With you, I feel as if the sun has begun to shine again,” I told her. “Would you do me the honor of accompanying me to dinner?”