h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I had another last minute change of mind so this got written in a bit of a rush just now. But it has the virtue of being almost exactly 1000 words.





Untitled.

Little rocks plopped into the river and broke its flow. Fish were scared away all around where the line dragged into the current. A woman reclined on the verge of the river, sunk in dreams, skimming stones around her line to scare the fish away. She scooped lazy handfuls of gravel and small pebbles and tossed them, a few at a time, with a graceful curve of her wrist. Her deep eyes were half shut, lazy like a cat's and her head nodded toward her shoulder.

She was fishing for ideas in the sun and rush of water and her mind wandered on unusual paths. Her imagination swept unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lay submerged in the depths of her unconscious being. She wandered across the image of her husband: a hooked nose in a worried face, but passed it quickly. There were deeper thoughts to be found.

Then she found, perhaps, what she was looking for. An idea that rushed and flared like an ember. It darted and sank, flashed hither and tither, and set up a wash and tumult of ideas. The thought, the idea, of a woman. Long legs and sturdy thighs, noble face and spoilt lips. Built for passion. In her reverie the woman smiled and sank her lazy eyes a little further. The thought was of the lady who had seduced her and stirred secrets in her. Remembering made her smile. But there was sadness there too. She had been chosen. She hesitated to think of it as love, the passionate kind of love that occurs to young women, but that was what it had been. Always she had been chosen for women, but still she was here alone at the river, because she had not been able to choose in return.
She knew... the part of her that remembered those lips knew... that it was not enough to be chosen by love, you have to be brave and make a leap and choose as you are chosen. And she had never been brave, and never had chosen, and that love had slipped away. The exquisite moments of passion in dark hours alone and long bright days, so many and so frequent for a while. And sometimes she had been ever so brave and almost she had chosen, in hinted phrases and veiled notes of passionate affection. And the pieces of herself that she should have given all at once, she parcelled out to all the women and men who touched her, fragments of her puzzled self that they might never join into a whole and make her choose just one.

There had always been women, always the choices coming and going. And she remembered them all now, all the women she might have loved and been blissful with. There had been brilliant talented women. One, a writer, had slipped away from her and then died, too young with words left on the tip of her pen. She came to her still, sometimes, in her dreams. A haunting brilliant vulgar woman, who had loved her and might have... if she had lived...


She was here at the river to think, and there was an urgency to her ramblings. Darkness was coming. Always returning to her, like the beautiful chances to love, was this dark long dread. She sat at the river fishing and tossing handfuls of grit to scare away the fish because she felt the darkness creeping upon her. She had told her husband and his worried brow had deepened but he had been calm and reassured her with words like those her last doctor had used. Then he had gone to work.

So she sat now, thinking and watching the river, waiting to see if what would come would be the chance again to love, or the darkness. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And she found that there was one love she had never given up or frittered away. She had poured it out over her life, in every word, all through the books she had written. Her truest love and her truest self; given freely, standing now beyond herself, immutable. She smiled and dashed another hand-full of pebbles into the water.

There was a letter in her pocket. A similar one waited for her husband on the blotter on his desk. But she would not send the letter in her pocket. There was no way to send it, but she had written it anyway. The woman it was addressed to existed only in her memory now. She had not died, but time plays tricks and she was as gone as if she had died when they had parted ways. She would take the letter with her and carry it herself.

It had been a cold day and the night would be colder still. The woman would have to go soon, but she lingered at the waters edge while the day lasted and let her imagination flow where it would for a while longer. She found the face of yet another woman. A face like her own, but rounder and softer with motherhood and a kinder temperament. This woman was the partner of her soul, and had been from the cradle. She had always been loved. Perhaps, she thought, that was why she had never been able to choose to love, or to give all of herself freely to another. She was already given and no human love could be greater. She felt herself filled with memories of years of love, a lifetime of devotion.

The darkness would come, she could not stop it, but it could never take from her all the great loves of her life. She was glad. At last she had found the right thought and everything made sense. She could go home.

She stood and reeled in the line, took a few more hand-fulls of pebbles and left. The river rippled and flowed on behind her.