The Pictographer
Short fiction by Sarah Little
Today’s piece was written by Sarah Little. When she’s not browsing through stacks of books or watching mysteries, Sarah Little is a poet and sometimes story-teller. Her poetry collection The Lachrymatorium was published with Roaring Junior in July 2022 and most recently she's been exploring fairy-tale motifs while branching out into fiction. Recent publications have been pieces in Heartbalm, Celestite, and Suburban Witch, among others.
he painted a portrait once, of the pair of you together. you were sitting there, comfortable, at ease, and it depicted the one time you were together before it all fell apart, (this is what we wanted, you’d reminded yourself, and let the tiny bit of smugness shine through.) and
he took the painting when he left.
so you spent five years forgetting the sound of his voice, and remembering the grey of his eyes, flecked with gold - or was it green? and
one morning there’s a package on the doorstep. thin, tall, flat, and there’s scribbled warnings all over - open carefully. no courier asks you to sign for it, there’s no tracking on it, even. he’s not been in the same city as you for seven months and three years, so how’s it here now?
if ever this is lost, it means i’m gone, he told you once. you’d laughed it off, kissed the nape of his neck. gone where, love?
he said nothing, then, scraping a butter knife over the toast. the sound had had you bristling, antsy to cover your ears, but you’d refrained, putting on the radio instead to cover the noise.
as he’d left for the day, you’d called out, if what is lost?
and so you hang the painting up now, pride of place in the room you use once a week, and he looks at you while you work. your younger self looks at you, and she is bemused. from the tilt of her eyebrows, you can hear yourself asking why are you doing that?
don’t we hate the job i chose?
sometimes, you take a break from working and look at the painting. brushstrokes so fine they disappear, sometimes, and other times they’re so vivid you can scrape your nail along the grooves. which is it, really? you cast your mind back, six years prior, and watch the paint being scraped onto the canvas, etched in places with a palette knife, but you don’t remember the brushes.
you air the office out, window flung wide, and the next morning as you pass the room there’s the smell in the air that catches your breath — his cologne, the one you bought in a rush for his birthday one year, and he said he loved it at first, but eventually you both grew to love it, so he never used anything else.
the mind is such a brittle thing, he said later.
today’s a work-at-home day, so you go into the office, and his painted self’s eyes are bluer than grey. is that right? they were blue, weren’t they? the dress your other self wears is green, now, when it was yellow before.
you never had a green dress, if you remember rightly, but it’s cold in here - probably because the window was open all night - and you go to retrieve a jumper. there’s no video calls for a while yet, it’s fine if you’re a bit scruffy. hanging on the door of the wardrobe (you broke that habit years ago) is a dress, deep green, short sleeves, just like your younger self wears.
the breast of the dress is pinned through with a cufflink, one of the engraved ones he commissioned for what was supposed to be your five-year anniversary. the other is on the ground, you discover by stepping on it, several feet below.
passing through the halls back to your office, you press the coffeemaker awake, letting the morning breeze carry the coffee smell through. it takes the sting out of the cologne, a little.
there’s a scraping, knife on burnt bread, and you freeze, call out hello? anyone there? and take your fresh coffee as your best weapon.
the kitchen is empty, but you knew that. as you turn to exit, you trip over the gleaming wingtips he always wore, spill your coffee down your front, feel the pressure of hands on yours to steady yourself.
there’s no-one there of course, but there never is, not these days. the painting was lost, but now it’s found, and there’s still no-one there. your home is thousands of miles away from the one the pair of you shared once, so of course it carries no trace that he was ever here.
except that you didn’t see the spare coffee cup draining in the kitchen, or the fresh gouge in the butter you opened last night and didn’t use.
the mind is such a brittle thing, after all.
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