Member-only story
Meteors
A Short Story
“I just want a year when nothing happens,” Karen said to me. “A whole year when all we do is eat and sleep, fix the house, and see no one. No disasters. No funerals, no weddings, nothing whatsoever. Just the two of us.”
To her list I might have added “no more false expectations” but I kept it to myself.
What had we seen? When we first visited, the door was barred with three pieces of plywood sloshed with graffiti. With the help of the agent we prised open the boards and scraped ourselves inside. Using a torch he flashed out the Victorian tiled floor, with its blue lilies and green intertwining stems, lying an inch deep in the dust and insects of twenty years dereliction. In a moment of stupidity or nostalgia, we’d seen in the warped walls and bug-gnawed timbres a project.
“Do you remember when we first visited?” Karen said later. “It had magic. We fell in love with it, didn’t we?”
“There was a spark,” I said, thinking of what people say when they talk about falling in love. So far we’d achieved too little, a mere half-home, surrounded by a snarl of wet brambles and flanked by two yellow skips sunken with debris. Just a few days before I’d been up to the loft and happened to put my hand against one of the beams. A fungus, like cotton wool, came off in strands on my fingers. When I aimed the torch I saw a…
