Infinies

The Narrator (english)

Note de l'autrice : "Cette short story est un devoir universitaire pour mon cours favoris en licence d'anglais - creative writing -. Je n'ai malheureusement gardé aucune autre histoire (qui étaient toutes plus courtes et écrites à la main lors de devoirs sur table), je suis un peu déçue. 

Cette short story date de 2014, c'était mon projet de fin de semestre, nous devions écrire une nouvelle d'une 10 aine de pages. 

J'aime énormément cette histoire, j'aimerais vraiment la réécrire - en mieux (et en français) !"

***

In Mary's head.

There he was in her dream again, as handsome as she remembered. Smiling warmly at her. Half-immersed in her overused bathtub, Mary was dreaming about her fiancé. She craved his touch, his voice, his kiss. And that dream was warming up both her heart and body as she was lying in cold water.

James had died about a year ago. He had left her countless memories, but not much wealth. They had lived together in a huge comfortable apartment, though it was his, and when he died: she had no other choice but to leave. Mary would not have been able to live in there anyway. She was still able to strongly feel his presence in that place. Now she lived in a very small, dark apartment.

"Who is it?" she cried, awaking in her bath. "In my head...Your voice. How is that possible? Is that even possible?!" Mary added confused. Her fingers caressing her skin, she pulled her legs slowly between her arms and laid her head on her knees to calm down. Mary kept that position for a long hour. Her bathtub had already seen worse: days of an inconsolable Mary, filling this haven with a myriad of cold tears.

Rocking back and forth, swallowing her cries; she finally calmed down. She allowed herself to touch delicately the surface, shaping the water into a small ring around her finger. The only light in the room was making her bath shimmer. It felt like magic in that small, dark apartment. Now relaxed, she might let herself speak out and evacuate her thoughts concerning her fiancé and her solitude?

"I don't know how you do that. How you know so much. Maybe I ask too many questions? You won't answer me, will you?" she wondered weirdly. 

"Oh well, it seems like you want to know about James. Don't you already know? I loved him deeply. And he loved me back as much. He was such a wonderful person. He would do anything to make me smile back in the day. And he was a musician, and a singer. James Baker was his name. He is still pretty known in the area. He used to play a lot here in New York. We met after one of his representations. I remember I followed him to a diner. And he bought me a drink. His death was my fault. I wish he had never met me for he would still be alive by now. After he proposed to me, he had that stupid idea stuck in his head: he wanted to write me a love song. But it drove him crazy. He became completely different. He couldn't write a song that would say it all. He was unable to write a song strong enough to express his feelings. One day that I was coming back from a week-end with my sister, I found his hanging corpse. He had taken his own life." she finished, weeping.

Mary had a sudden thought: she should go check out that diner, where she had met her fiancé a couple of years sooner. 

"I wasn't thinking about that" she whispered to herself. She got up and left the cold and secure water of her haven. Getting ready in a trice, she walked in the dark streets, a red dot in a black night.

When she arrived at the diner, she stopped, overwhelmed with a bitter feeling of melancholy. She entered. There was a man at the bar, plus the bartender. Her eyes lasted for a minute on another man though. He was sitting alone and seemed deep in his head. Mary decided not to bother him and went to sit next to the other man. The bartender recognized her. This made her even more uneasy. He was a music-lover, she understood. And the strong feeling of sadness was coming back to her as he was trying to sing like her James.