This Is Just To Say

The note is pinned to the fridge where I left it this morning.

You have eaten all the plums.

They were for jam, you greedy so-and-so. My only consolation is knowing you’ll be shitting until the weekend.

Sleep tight. And please buy more plums!

Love you.

S x

Some couples flirt over email. Some stay up talking long into the night. We have our notes.

Thanks to opposing shift patterns, we’re together maybe two or three times a week: sometimes just for a few minutes, sometimes for a whole day or night. (Rarely for any longer than that, except for holidays or when someone dies.) It’s been that way for most of our marriage. It’s probably the reason we’ve stayed together so long.

Our partnership has evolved like any other. We have our ups and downs. We say harsh words and take them back. We joke and tease. We share memories and make plans. We know each other better than anyone else could.

We just do most of it by notes.

Of course, some things can’t be achieved through notes. Like making babies. But our shifts were more forgiving back then so we surprised ourselves by making three of them. We coordinated most of their upbringing through an increasingly functional series of notes stretching 20 years, punctuated by occasional family camping trips and funerals. Those were the toughest years. For a while there we lost ourselves amongst reminders for dentist appointments and paperclipped permission slips. As the children grew, hints of our old selves emerged: an extra kiss here, an in-joke there, a surprise post-it note on the bathroom mirror. It was like courting all over again.   

I turn the paper over to see his reply. Somewhere in the 90s, daughter number two became very upset by all the trees that suffered for our notes. We have replied to each other on the back ever since, continuing long after she left home. She has tried to get us into text messaging but it has none of the romance. The paper in front of me is the perfect reflection of us: two different sides of the same coin.

Forgive me. I will go to Tesco on my way home in the morning.

They were delicious though. Just like you. I regret nothing. Neither do my bowels.

Sleep tight. Good luck tomorrow.

A x

I see rushing in his looser-than-usual scrawl. He must have overslept again. I smile and re-read it.

I think about my next note as I bring in the washing. (He hangs it out in the mornings before going to sleep and I bring it in later – one of our many routines.) It will be the last note I leave on the fridge before work.

I retire tomorrow.

After that I will be there when he gets home every morning and I’ll see him off every dinner time. Six months later he will retire. Then I suppose we’ll hardly ever be apart. It is an alien thought, although I don’t know why. He is already everywhere in this house: his mug on the side, his almost-finished crossword, his toothbrush next to mine, his smell in our bed.

I wonder how he feels about us growing old together, in the same house at the same time. Will it be like an endless version of our summer holidays? Or an endless funeral? He would say the reality will be somewhere in the middle. Like a weekend in Weston-Super-Mare.

A restless night passes. In my dreams I have a note to write but I can’t find the paper or pen or even the words. In the morning, I’m exhausted and nervous about the day ahead as I sit alone at the breakfast table. But the note comes easily. They always have.

Prompt 3

Use the first line of a (favourite) poem as a base for a story.

Or

Use the same or another poem and turn it into a Perrault style fairy tale (Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Beauty and The Beast ,Puss in Boots etc)

Ring finger

My wife had her wedding ring cleaned two weeks ago. An oddly symbolic act; she peered at it, declared the platinum band looked scuffed, beaten up… and hot-footed it to the jewellers. It seems an unlikely thing to do, impulsively hand over your wedding ring to a stranger to strip it of its character (“Not character, filth,” she declared, when I questioned her on it) and then return it, good as new, as it was on the day I placed it on her ring finger. She said that it felt like an anniversary, a cleansing – a fresh start.

I hadn’t looked at my ring at the time, hadn’t even thought about having it cleaned too, though looking back I think that perhaps she was poised on the edge of asking me to do the same, renew that vow with her.  But she didn’t. She might have known that my reaction would have been hesitant, evasive, bracing for a criticism that didn’t come; she might have been seeking evidence. We both just admired the clean sanctity of the metal against her skin, the clear window of diamond that opened in the light, and acknowledged a job well done. “Didn’t you worry that they might lose it, somehow, or mix it up with someone else’s ring?” I asked afterward, but she just rolled her eyes at me with a smile, and made some flip, inappropriate comment about babies in a hospital. The implication: nothing so untoward as a mixing up of rings could possibly happen in a jewellers.

Today, though, I am going to hand over my ring to be stripped down and rebuilt, so I can squeeze it over the swollen knuckle on the ring finger of my scrubbed hands and admire its coolness against my raw skin. I’ve made reservations at Cinico, my wife’s favourite restaurant, and I’m looking forward to surprising her when the taxi takes us there rather than to a fictional dinner party she’s dreading. She won’t notice the ring, I’m sure of it; she’s too obsessed with her own. If anything, she’ll ask about my hands: why is the skin stretched taut as tarpaulin, and what caused that bruise? I have an answer to reassure with, so I’m not worried.