Brigid Swanick

Short Fiction

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When Brian left me I started spending all of my time at the diner. I was lonely and friendless and my apartment made me sad. I would sit in the corner eating toast and drinking coffee and imagine that Brian had died instead of just broken up with me for being boring. He hadn’t said I was, but I knew that that was really why, which I thought was unfair, because most people are boring once you get to know them. So I imagined that he’d died tragically and I was by extension also tragic – a beautiful woman in mourning, ruminating on my husband’s memory and sighing a lot. Looking out of windows. This is how I would get people to talk to me. This is also what I told the waitress, Veronica, in detail – that I was grieving, bereft, I even cried a little. She was sympathetic. It was close enough to true so as to not really matter that it wasn’t. The point is I was sad. So I solicited her compassion. 

For about a week she would sit down with me for a bit and nod and furrow her eyebrows while I told her stories about Brian’s illness and demise. I told her that he’d written me letters –though actually I was writing them myself – one each day for the year following his death, which I read to her each day until eventually her eyes were glazing over and she cracked her neck and looked around and over my shoulder, she, like Brian, having become bored. When I realized I was losing her I panicked. I threw myself onto the floor and began convulsing. Brian hated when I did this. It was wrong of him to presume what was and was not a real seizure. The implication that they were conveniently timed was unfair, as my seizures were triggered by emotional pain, and seizures are never convenient, usually. Except this one was a bit, because Veronica jumped beside me to the floor and put her hands beside my head so they didn’t bang into the table, which I thought was quite smart of her. I loved her in that moment and knew that she cared about me, and when the paramedics asked me if I knew where I was and I told them confidently that I was at the gas station across the road from the cemetery where Brian was buried, she looked at me with such pity that I felt my heart was full. She held my hand as they rolled me into the ambulance and I promised to read her the next letter if I ever made it out of the hospital, which it was hard to tell, but it might be a brain tumor sometimes you get a feeling about these things. She nodded and held one hand to her heart and waved as they shut the doors.

In the emergency room I told the nurses a slightly different story, how my husband had left me when he had heard about my brain tumor. How the wedding was six months away when the seizures started and three by the time he’d ran off, leaving a letter behind him with a cryptic poem about how nothing lasts forever. This had become the fullest expression of my creativity. I could be anyone to them. I could play the oboe, be born in West Virginia, played rugby in college. They would listen and move around carts and tubes and things and I would shock them with my story of Brian’s callous abandonment. They were the perfect audience, inclined enough to take me at my word but never close enough to question it. Later they would bring me extra turkey sandwiches and orange juice in the kind of disposable containers apple sauce usually comes in and pat me on the shoulder before leaving again. Peeling the foil lid off the orange juice felt to me like love, like Christmas. I was always a good patient. Rarely, someone would actually ask me about woodwind instruments, but this type of predicament was quickly resolved by a bit of seizing or other redirection by sudden appearance of this or that other medical emergency. Their questions and concerns, their desire to help me, their intense focus entirely on me made me obsessed, made me visible in a world that was otherwise indifferent.

 My stories felt true to me, felt possible, and I was insulated from real judgement because there was no true self for them see. It had become easier to lie to bring people closer to me until eventually I couldn’t stop. But no matter, because I was happy. It was enough. 

Dearest Veronica,

The tumor is inoperable. Is it incredible that Brian and I should die exactly the same way! God works in mysterious ways. The migraines are excruciating. They tell me that I don’t have long to live but it brings me some relief to know that soon I will be reunited with him. I have enclosed the remainder of his letters that he left me to read posthumously, because I feel that someone should read them if I cannot. Please know my gratitude to you for the time you shared with me. I depart this world in peace.

I had to find a different diner after that, after they confronted and discharged me from the hospital. I saw Veronica again one time, across the street, across traffic, and she looked like she’d seen a ghost, which I was to her, but as a bus crossed between us I dashed away, stealing down another street, adrenaline pulsing through me at the thrill of it all, and I wondered if she thought she had imagined me.

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Brigid Swanick is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York, with her dog, Olive. She works in the film industry shaping light and moving heavy things around. She has work forthcoming in Peatsmoke Journal.

Photo Credit: Grace Zhu is an artist and a writer based in Toronto, Canada. She’s part of MOCA’s youth council and The Reckoner.