Short Story / Stacy
I look up at the clock on the wall, see that it’s nearly noon. Six hours until Stacy gets off work. I miss her. For some reason, I feel as though I haven’t seen her for ages, even though she left barely two hours ago. I get up and pace around the kitchen for a while, my coffee too hot to drink for the moment. I look in the fridge, not really hungry, just trying to kill time for Stacy to get home.
It’s our anniversary tonight. I’ve already ordered the flowers. The delivery man should be here soon. I also made reservations. We’re supposed to be at the Rosemont at eight o’clock. Stacy will be excited. It’s her favorite restaurant.
I shut the fridge, not seeing anything that grabs my attention, and walk back over to my coffee. Still a little too hot, but I gulp it down anyway, just so I can wash the cup. It takes thirty seconds. I look up at the wall clock. Twelve-oh-four. Six o’clock seems like an eternity away.
I’m excited. I found a locket that I think Stacy will love. It was sitting in the display window of an old antique shop that I hadn’t seen before. Its shape isn’t what’s exciting, it’s just the usual heart, but it looks at least two or three hundred years old. I’ve been hiding it for a week now.
The clock seems to be broken. I stare at it, willing it to go faster, but instead it seems to stop entirely. I lose myself in it, or maybe I lose myself in thought, but when I start paying attention again, the clock has leapt forward. It’s now twelve thirty, and that’s when the doorbell rings.
I open the door and see a delivery man holding a bundle of flowers, which he hands to me. ”How you doing, Mr. Crenshaw?” I nod to him, taking the flowers. ”Is it your anniversary or something?” he asks. I nod again, smiling a little. He smiles back, but there seems to be something behind the smile, like he’s about to cry for some reason. After a moment, the something disappears, and his smile seems to reinforce itself until it looks genuine. ”Well, I hope you have a good evening, Mr. Crenshaw.”
I thank him and shut the door. I race back to the kitchen, sure that the encounter has taken up at least twenty minutes, maybe more. Instead, I see that it’s only twelve-thirty-five. I’ll never make it to six o’clock, I think. I’m excited, nervous, antsy. It feels like it’s been months, years, decades since I’ve seen Stacy, and I miss her so much right now that it feels like a physical ache, like someone just punched me in the stomach and left me gasping for air. I need to do something, anything to take my mind off the long, horrible stretch of time ahead of me. Five hours. An eternity.
I turn on the TV, but there’s nothing good on. It seems like there’s never anything good on. I flip through the channels listlessly for a minute before I click the television off. The newspaper. Nothing good in here either, more stories of war, lying, scandal. I do the crossword puzzle. When I finish it, I hear the clock in the kitchen strike the hour. One o’clock. Stacy should be going to lunch soon. I wonder if she’ll call home.
I try not to think about it. I turn the page from the crossword puzzle. The next page is the comics page. I scan through it quickly, chuckling here and there at a few genuinely clever comics, but most of them look like they were created solely to sell plush dolls with suction cups to hang them from your car window.
Time continues to drag.
I finish milking the newspaper for every drop of entertainment I can wring from it, and it’s still only one-forty-five. The time is killing me, refusing to speed up. I want to see Stacy. I don’t know why I’m so anxious, but I am. I can’t help it. I’m as excited as a child on Christmas Eve, imagining the sound of sleigh bells.
The phone rings, and I jump for it. She’s calling. It’s not going to completely satisfy my need to see her, but it will help. Maybe we’ll talk for her whole lunch, a full hour, and then it will be nearly three o’clock, a mere three hours left.
But it’s not her. Instead, it’s a solicitor, inquiring as to whether or not I have a subscription to the Times. I look at the newspaper that I’d just finished reading, wondering why they are calling me, wondering what sort of tracking system they’re using when I clearly have a subscription, have had one for years. The disappointment is huge, and I end up taking it out on the solicitor.
I don’t know what I said to him. I may have blacked out for a moment, but the end result is the same either way. My face is flushed, I feel myself sweating, and the phone is buzzing at me in its idiot monotone.
The clock chimes two. Six o’clock is never going to come.
I spend an hour playing solitaire, cheating when I can’t get the aces out. It’s the slowest hour of my life.
The clock chimes three. Six o’clock might come after all.
I try to read. I find it hard to concentrate, and give up after realizing that I’ve been reading the same page, the same paragraph, the same sentence for ten minutes now.
The clock chimes four.
Time slows down even further now, stretching out like taffy. Seconds become minutes, minutes become hours, hours simply cease to exist.
Six o’clock seems so close, and yet forever out of my reach.
I see the flowers lying on the table, seemingly forgotten. I feel a rush of sorrow at this, completely inexplicable. I can’t just leave them like that, I think. What if Stacy comes home and sees them like that? I rush over, fill up a small vase by the kitchen sink. A few quick rips and the flowers are free of the wrapping they came in. A few more seconds and they are safely ensconsced in the vase. There. They look better already. Now Stacy will be happy when she sees them.
Five o’clock comes, and suddenly the time speeds up. The minutes are stumbling over each other now in their haste to fly past. I blink, and it’s five-thirty. Now it’s five-forty. Five-fifty.
And now the time slows down again, cruelly. Those last ten minutes seem like years, decades, centuries. I wait, breathless. The minute hand ticks slowly towards twelve.
The clock strikes six, and I gasp, startled. She’ll be home soon.
I tense, waiting for the low purr of her car pulling into the driveway.
Nothing.
Stacy gets off at five, right in time for rush hour, so it’s not impossible that she’s still in transit somewhere, stuck in a long, snarled line of traffic. Even though it’s killing me, I sit and wait some more.
The minute hand moves around the clock, six-oh-five now, then six-ten, six-fifteen.
Impossible. She’s never this late. And she can’t be much later, or else we’ll miss our reservations at the Rosemont. I pick up the phone, start to dial her cell phone. After a moment, I get a recording, telling me that her phone is no longer in service. Now I really start to worry. Did she forget to pay her bill? Is she having money problems that she didn’t tell me about? I don’t get it. I start to pace again, roaming around the house aimlessly.
I wander up to the bedroom, sit down heavily on the bed. There’s a photo album next to the bed, on Stacy’s side. She must have been looking at it last night. I pick it up and walk down to the kitchen with it. The kitchen connects to the garage. That’s where Stacy will come in.
I start flipping through the album idly, laughing at the pictures that bring a full freight of memories along with them. Our honeymoon. Our first anniversary. The road trip we took to New York, where we got lost trying to found New York City and wound up in Montauk, just driving, hoping to find our way, until we literally ran out of land.
There were a few blank pages near the last quarter of the book, and then there were clippings pasted into the back of the book. I read through the first one, frowning. It described a car accident on a stretch of road that rang a bell with me, somewhere deep in my subconscious. That was it, just a little blurb, really, and then I flipped to the next page.
A second clipping of that same accident, this time with a picture of a car on its roof. The line at the end of the story simply said the newspaper was withholding the identity of the victim pending notification of the victim’s family. I turned the page shakily.
I had known what was coming, had known it all along somewhere, which was probably why the album was out on the nightstand rather than up in the closet where it belonged. But it still knocked the wind out of me to turn the page and see it there, in stark, unforgiving black and white. A picture of Stacy, smiling out at me, her picture superimposed above the same photo of the wreckage from the previous page. I turned the pages faster now, flipping past more news clippings, an obituary, and finally, the funeral program. I screamed, throwing the album across the room, where it landed facedown.
I lay on the ground, curled into the fetal position, and cried myself to sleep.
I woke up on the floor of the kitchen, worried. Had Stacy and I had a fight? And if we had, why was in the kitchen? Shouldn’t I have slept on the couch instead? I stood up, and saw a photo album out of the corner of my eye. It was face down on the floor, and I bent over to pick it up. It was open, to a picture taken on our road trip to New York. I closed it and put it back on the nightstand. Stacy must have been looking at it before we started fighting, and somehow it got thrown. Maybe if I left it by her nightstand, she’d see it as a peace offering. I started climbing the stairs, trying not to wake Stacy up.
The bed was empty when I got there, and the clock showed eleven o’clock. She must already be at work.
I realized what horrible timing it was for our fight. I had to make it up to her. I immediately got on the phone, called the Rosemont. After I got off the phone, I called the florist and arranged for a delivery of flowers.
Dinner at the Rosemont and the flowers would both set me back some, but I figured it would be worth it. I had to make it up to Stacy, because we couldn’t be fighting, not tonight, especially not tonight.
After all, tonight was our anniversary.
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This comes off as a story about an excited husband, waiting to suprise his wife with an anniversary present, but it turns out she has been killed in a road crash and he is in denial of her death after they rowed.
I think it would be useful for the reader to know it was an annerversary present earlier in the story.
typo’s errors
just trying to kill time for Stacey to get home- until Stacey gets home
comma’s not need after ands and buts.
twelve oh four-twelve-o-four
Bundle of flower- bunch of flowers
(examples of comma over use as follows) I’m excited,nervous,antsy. Try I’m excited,nervous and antsy.
more stories of wars,lying,scandal-try- more stories of war,lying and scandal.
taffy-toffee
Theres a paragraph where the solicitor is ringing about the guys subscription to the Times. the reader needs to know what this is about and what is said, that seems weird, I’m assumming after having read the end of the story, the solicitor may of been asking if hes read about her death in the Times, if not why would he be asking about a Times subscription.
I do think this is a good basis for a story.
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Awesome. I realized that Stacy was dead before the narrator opened the scrap book, but his experience of discovery was still moving. And then he forgot again, which was very powerful.
I think I understand your vision for the narrator’s journey through the mundane before reaching the thrust of the story, but it was SO routine and trite that I almost stopped reading.
Now, I’m no expert in the techniques of defamiliarization, but my suggestion is that you make the kitchen scene a bit more exotic. Stay with the narrator’s separation anxiety but of just saying the deliveryman arrived and gave him some flowers, say something like, “I unseal the pop-top hatch to my sardine-can dwelling, and I’m faced with a porkpie-crowned chauffeur extending a bundle of bright plumes that burst forth at me like grand-finally fireworks. I sweep them into my greedy claw and refortify my palisade against the fulgent world.”
Anyway, the point is: give the readers some entertaining prose to drive them forward while you work up to the thrust of Stacey’s death.
Good work.
“This was written in about 45 minutes” nice bravery…thats about the best thing i got for ya, Hig. bravery is the best quality a writer can have so far as I know, so you’re one up on most already. you’ve got skills but ya probably know that relationship stuff—boy meets girl, boy loves girl (vice versa) is the hardest thing to write. I am fairly fearless (i think ya know cause you reviewed something of my mind, haven’t had a chance to look at your critique yet but am very interested in it). as fearless as i am, i never make relationship the center of my plots. there’s an old screwball comedy by the best screenwriters ever in Hollywood (in my view and a few others), Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, called “Boy Meets Girl” in which Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien play successful screenwriters (i.e. Hecht & MacArthur) who are fed up w/ writing ‘boy meets girl’ cause it’s so hard to make it anything but stale…the movie is hysterical (and if you can find it), a far better commentary on the problems of this “genre” than anything i could tell you about what you’re facing in.
i do thing you have plenty of skill. to “animate” this more, I would suggest an acual flashback to the time spent in new york between the husband and wife—dialogue a couple of scenes. this would give the narrative forward moment it lacks. you could also throw in some latent conflict that the piece lacks. it just a thought and you could ignore it of course. anyway, i think you’ve set a difficult task for yourself, but you probably have the talent to attack it as well as anybody if you think pretty hard about the problems and do some re-writing.
Good luck, and thanks for reading my stuff,
greg oguss
You just broke my heart, I am literally fighting tears. Something about death in a relationship of love always gets me, it’s so tragic and I am too romantic, so it breaks my heart every time.
This is a great story, the way you hint at the end with the flower delivery man and yet it comes as a twist.
Your description of how slow the time moves is also great. You rush it a bit in the later hours between two and six, maybe you could expand on that part. I think the reader should be as frustrated with time moving so slowly as the character is. (I am a big fan of participatory art, so make me suffer if he suffers!)
A few language things (though this is really nit-picky now): “we got lost trying to found New York City”, the verb should be “find”, right?
And this sentence: “There were a few blank pages near the last quarter of the book, and then there were clippings pasted into the back of the book.” I think you can cut the last “of the book”, it’s clear.
I really liked this and I will be checking back for new versions to see how it evolves into the masterpiece it can be. So keep writing!
I like your idea here. Since you indicated that you wrote this very quickly, I’ll just make a few suggestion that I think would enhance the piece. I’d shift the focus of the beginning to narrator thinking about his interactions and relationship with Stacy. But write out the details, like dialogue for instance. This would allow you to characterize both her and the narrator. As it stands now, both character seem largely like placeholders that are simply present to get to the narrative twist at the end. Besides, reading about the narrator passing time in pedestrian ways gets boring rather quickly. I think the ending would have more emotional impact and resonance if you did this as well. You may also want to go into more detail about the narrator’s realization. Throw some denial in there while your at it. Good idea and nice ending.
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