A Plaid Scarf

Another of the 500 word exercises. Interpreted liberally, this is the result of a prompt which asked for a story written about the first thing you see upon opening a random book.

A Plaid Scarf

When I met April, we were drunk. She offered me a cigarette, and we smoked together on the back porch of a friend of mine from college. She told me she was a poet. I told her I’d read a poem once.

It was a cold September night. In between drags, our breath hung in the air. April was draped in grey and white – her dress colored the shadows around her lighter. A green and black plaid scarf was wrapped around her. It swallowed her hair.

The metallic taste of cheap beer cementing itself into the back of my throat, I listened to her talk.

“We’re all looking for the countries we wish we were from,” she said.

“The problem is that no one has any understanding for anyone. We’re devoid of empathy.” Her mantra spun out into the air around us, hanging as heavy as our smoke. I watched the way her throat moved when she talked, how she cupped her hand around her cigarette, the way she exhaled smoke out of the far corner of her mouth. Her eyes, dark with practice, stuck on mine.

“We’re all following our own paths,” I said. “Conflict is inherent. You can’t avoid that.”

April grinned her way through a grimace.

“That’s what should be changed,” she said.

Two months later I stood in the doorway to the kitchen, watching her dance to nineties songs in the living room of the apartment we’d made ours. I grinned at the way she moved. Even when being ridiculous, she was a breeze made flesh.

When I started conversations, it was with an idea for the future. She started conversations with ideas for that moment. She wrote late into the night. I would pretend to be asleep, listening to the staccato flash of her typing. We spent weekend mornings naked, drinking coffee in bed. It was always cold, and I would trace with light fingertips the goose bumps prickling her arms and shoulders.

April danced, and I watched.

She told me when it was over, of course. All of her dissatisfaction built up and spilled over, she said.

I can’t be contained, she said.

I can’t be held here, she said.

I can’t just be kept, she said.

“I’m like a butterfly, and you’re trying to pin my wings down,” she said.

I laughed in her face after that one. She said a lot of things, and I didn’t have much to say.

When I woke up the next morning, the apartment was quiet. It was a Saturday morning. I walked into the living room, naked. I stood in front of the one window and looked at all of the other buildings. They looked dusty in the grey morning light.

April had only left one thing. The green and black plaid scarf lay on my desk. It was draped over a stack of bills and notes. I lifted it, reverent, and pressed it to my face. I inhaled. It smelled like women’s shampoo and cigarettes.