-a short story by Hussein

The phone rang. Once… twice… why didn’t I pick the receiver up? It just laid in its rest as the answering machine triggered another round of tedious blabber by an electrified voice that uttered “Not home at the moment. You know what to do.” As if the person on the other end of the line had been hurled a bolt of electricity, he started talking without even waiting for the ‘beep.’ My cousin, Kaine, had always been a restless, spirit-wired little kid, but this time, he was talking to me as a full-grown man, stumbling here and there but, otherwise, unusually straightforward. “…pick up the phone. She’s dead. She died from a car accident on her way home from the city yesterday. Her dad wants to talk to you.”

The moment I heard that Kristine had died, I plummeted deeper into the hollow of the bed. “I was just holding her hand yesterday and now she has left me, without giving me any premonition,” wait, she wanted to give the necklace back, the symbol of our relationship. She said I would never see her again… “My god, she’s gone.”

The light from the lamp invited its bleeding presence into the four proportionally disturbed corners of the half-lit room. My throbbing chest had swallowed the warmth of the sea breeze, followed by a pregnant silence. The silence had crept inside me, engulfing every explosive ‘tick’ of the wall clock that vomited a primeval bird with eyes on the outside. My bare feet napped blissfully abandoned, lost in a smothering of some counterfeit Kashmiri blanket. They were numb to the mercurial cold, while my arm was pallid, the other fast asleep, and a diaphanous image drifted over my waning thoughts.

I tried to recall the day I last saw the only one I loved.

Kristine walked in the restaurant with a smile on her face. She was wearing her usual look -- wash-and-wear denims, snug-fit white cotton shirt, and a slanted crown of soft, dark hair. She just turned 21 a month ago, but her youthful countenance was always coupled with nippy wits aimed at juvenile jokes, which I never ran out of. She saw me before I waved at her to tell her that I came ahead of time, a rarity in most, if not all, of our dates. I sensed a feeling of hesitance in her eyes but she kept walking towards me. She sat across the table, looking me in the eye, imploring the first words to be mine.

She spoke first. “I’m pregnant.” She knew that those words had taken me by surprise for I could not hide my unspoken ‘WHAT!!’ We had always practiced safe sex but this time things went awry on a fast curve.

“What do you want to do? I don’t think I’m ready for this,” I asked.

“I’m not either, but I can’t abort this child. Not while I’m alive, no.”

“But Kris, you know we can’t support this child. I’m not ready.”

“My dad’s going to kill me. She didn’t want me to go out with you in the first place.”

“I know that he hates me and this is not going to help,” I jokingly said.

“Please say that you will go through all this with me.”

“But Kris, I don’t think…”

She started crying. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. Here, take this,” she handed me the necklace but I refused to take it. She took it back, put it on, and scurried out of the restaurant. “You will never see me again.”

Those were her last words. I didn’t even have the chance to take back what I said. I could have said sorry to her that night, but instead, I ignored the guilt and shame that told me to run after her. I called Kaine and another friend, and we went to the theater to watch a movie without a name. A name that could have existed but still escapes my memory until this moment.

At the movie house, there was a girl who was sitting two rows down and she could not stop glancing at us. She would turn her head towards our seats and I knew that she was looking at us, or at me. The room was quite dark but once in awhile a sun-drenched setting in the movie would light up the room and there I thought I saw Kristine catching a glimpse of me and smiling. That was a little after 11:00 pm, twenty minutes after her car crashed.

I couldn’t believe I lost her. I didn’t want to think of her, stuck in her car while the last piercing pain finally robbed her one more breath of life. My Kristine, my love, why did you leave me like this?

I gently lowered the lids of my sodden eyes, dilating in the dark. I pressed my left ear against the sunken pillow while the other was jutted out as calmly as the night perpetually went by. My tongue brushed the contours of my mouth, purging it of last night’s unfortunate incident, which I could still taste with every effort to cry her name out.

I quickly turned and laid on my back as I felt a gush of panic as if someone was choking me. Then I felt a cold metallic object brushing against my neck. I opened my eyes and I saw Kristine floating right above me with eyes wide open, the necklace hanging around her pale neck. I closed my eyes and said ‘Forgive me, my love.’ When I opened them again, she was gone but the necklace was heavy on my chest.