I dunno, I was looking at a pair of people in their forties doing their grocery shopping when I noticed some BIG differences in their speech patterns. What was between them appeared to be based on a playful friendship and she seemed affluent to a fair degree.
It made me wonder how they got together. They were too new to have been together for very long, but it came to me that if you have a reason to try hard, by that time, you can let a lot of things go by the boards, if you find the right person.
So then I went back to my own grocery shopping, but my brain was already spinning its little cogs as I thought about new relationships at that point in life. There are the usual reasons, but I wasn't thinking of those. I thought about death and the wreckage that can leave.
I was thinking about putting this in the 'Mature' section, but I checked and that says May/December things. This is a romance. They're just not 21 anymore.
Before I knew it I was working on this in my head in the grocery store. By the time that I got in a check-out line to pay, I was a little pleased with myself. I wasn't thinking of a big long thing, but I now had the story in my little head. It makes a little difference climatically, but the Thanksgiving long weekend in this is the Canadian one, so it happens a lot earlier.
It wasn't until I got home that I realized that I hadn't gotten ONE of the specials that I was after. Not one.
~sigh~ 0_o
*****
Pete looked down, wondering a little at himself. His gaze took in his hands and they said a certain word to him as he saw the ridges of the veins and arteries underneath the surface of his skin. He'd have bet any money that right now, he wouldn't be able to see this clearly. He told himself that he ought to be trying to see through tears at this point.
But he wasn't.
He was looking at the backs of his hands, with an idle thought passing through as he wondered just when it had been that they'd transitioned on him again. He hadn't sat down to count the times or the nature of the changes, but he remembered when they were smooth and unscarred, the hands of a young boy.
He remembered when they'd grown larger into the hands of a teenager, young and strong and growing even stronger, and by that time, they already bore a very few scars. Most of those had gone by now, but he could still see the deep one on the top of his right index finger. He curled that hand, looking for the other part of that scar -- the one which had been across the back of his right thumb. But that one seemed to have disappeared somewhere back down the road.
He'd gotten them because he'd held a piece of reinforcing rod tightly in his right fist once. It had been all that he'd seen lying around one night when a man had tried to mug him, brandishing a knife. He was only seventeen at the time and he'd been scared shitless. The man was large, white, and looked to be in his early thirties. Pete could still hear the voice on him.
There hadn't been any 'Gimme your money and you won't get hurt' to it.
It had only been "Gimme your money, motherfucker."
Pete hadn't known what to do then, and he remembered a public service announcement that it was always safest to just give a mugger your cash.
It had been what he'd wanted to do, but then his assailant had stepped through the glare of a street lamp as he'd stomped over and Pete had seen those eyes. He didn't see much reasoning ability in there at all, and looking around, he'd seen the re-rod section lying there at the edge of the construction site nearby. The mugger had swung that knife a few times and Pete didn't think that his honest offering of all that he had on him would have prevented a whole lot.
He doubted that men such as this would even accept three and a half bucks.
He was sure of it when the knife connected to the rod and skipped down its length to open his finger and thumb as it had slashed past.
Pete wasn't a big guy or anything, he'd been only average-sized, but he'd prevailed - if winning a knife fight with a lunatic counts for much. It had only been the plan to keep the guy at bay until Pete could get a clear exit to run. But it became clear that it wasn't going to happen fairly early on. Pete chalked it up to the power of fear-driven desperation that a skinny teenager could stab a huge assailant through the chest with an unsharpened piece of re-rod. It hadn't gone in very far and it had the effect that Pete wanted. It stopped the guy's raging fury. Before anything else could happen, Pete hit him alongside the head a few times, dropped the rusted rod and run for his life through the rain.
He'd never gotten the cuts seen to, since that would have involved a trip to the hospital and he'd have had to make up a story - which he'd never been any good at. Some people could fabricate ornate and very plausible lies in an instant, but not Pete.
So he'd just gone home and cleaned it up himself and the major part of the reminder of that night was still there on his finger. He thought about that night for a second and he remembered how he'd tried for a few days to find out about any injured muggers by listening to the radio and trying to get a look at any newspapers that crossed his path.
He'd never heard a thing, but he knew that the man he'd left behind him had been dead at best and if not, then if there was anyone at all who'd loved him, they might have been faced with remembering to bring him a new coloring book for his birthdays for the rest of his life.
Pete had been a teenager then and wouldn't have dreamt of harming anyone. But he knew that it would have been him found dead the next morning and he'd been scared to death.
Pete remembered the changes to his hands when something had happened to him at near to eighteen. He'd suddenly seemed to have discovered the refrigerator, and had found himself with a raging metabolic rate. He could out-eat any junkyard dog, eating anything, everything, at any time and as much as he could hold and nothing would ever show on him.
He grew taller at a time when that was supposed to be over for him and he grew leaner. The jobs that he'd had to do back then just formed his body. He'd never been big or the muscleman type, but Pete had a build on him back then. It was still there too, not that anybody would give a shit now.
But Maggie had.
Maggie had been a shy and rather short girl back then, the sweetest thing that Pete had ever set his eyes on and it was as though neither one had any say in what happened. They'd just gravitated toward one another and gone from there.
They'd never had any kids. Maggie couldn't for some medical reason with a long name. She'd felt bad about that and Pete felt for her because she was his world, but Pete only felt for Maggie. Whatever it had been hadn't changed a thing for Pete.
He'd had the love of that girl. That made everything all right.
The world went on, spinning in its crazy way, but at least it was round and it made sense to them. They had each other.
He wondered if he'd just been short-sighted, but he supposed that the way that it was supposed to go was that they went on forever.
He looked up and saw Maggie's face there in the hospital bed, her eyes closed for the last time.
After more than thirty years of his doing anything for her and always being ready to do more of whatever she'd asked of him, Pete now realized that he was unemployed at the only job that he'd really ever wanted.
He was intelligent and well-spoken and he had a lot of skills, but all of those things were only attributes which had enabled him to keep them fed, clothed, and in possession of the things that Maggie had said that they'd needed on the rare occasions that she'd mentioned anything.
He supposed that there had been ample time for him to come to the realization that one day; he was going to lose her to the disease which had claimed her today. Maybe that was the reason that he wasn't crying.
