Friends, hello!
It has sadly been a while.
I’ve been wanting to post All The Things, but been bogged down with a new job (which I adore) and the fatigue of arriving home after a long day and just wanting to watch a show on Hulu while munching any available food in the apartment…
Yesterday, though, was my day off.
And I wrote a thing.
You may recall that last month(ish?), I joined a writerly sort of linkup-y thing that Jem was hosting over at her lovely site. Basically, she posts a little picture-prompt to get our brain juices moving and we write a tiny wee story.
Last month I wrote about best friends and a little goddaughter and two rather emotional bois.
This month….
Well. I’ll just let you read it. However, please note that I enlisted the help of my 9-year-old niece and she is thoroughly invested in this story. I read the end result to her (just parts of it, actually, some of it felt too… over her head?) and she is a Huge Fan.
To quote her, “This could be a publisher book!”
So I present, with both the help and endorsement of Xay, my newest flash fiction:
Her phone lit up, and her heart did, too.
Morning, love
His text gave her the smile, the momentum, to push herself upright, tossing the too-crisp, too-white sheets off her legs.
Bryar stood slowly, trying to soak the sunshine pouring in the window into her bones. Confronting the massive wardrobe that held her scanty selection of button-up shirts and retro skirts, she ponder the necessity of pants.
“Who needs ’em,” she muttered. “It’s nearly sweater season… I’m just getting a headstart.”
It was nearly fall… that warm, mellow part of summer that felt humid but cool and smelled like bonfires. The cable knit sweater Bryar had worn to bed the night before, a warm brown, fell nearly to her knees and she wouldn’t see anyone all day anyway.
The house was quiet. Bryar hated it. After the wild whirlwind of a college dorm, this luxurious mansion felt absolutely stifling. It was too big. Granny died when Bryar was just ten — she always smiled when she remembered how Granny had made this mute giant of a home seem full and alive. Ever since she’d been gone, it just seemed like… like it was waiting for something. Maybe for Granny to come back. Bryar sighed.
“She isn’t coming back, old house.”
When had she started talking to herself? She wasn’t quite sure… perhaps when her life had fallen into shambles about six months ago and her stellar GPA and gleaming career possibilities turned overnight into dropout status and homelessness.
Anyway, she wasn’t about to stop.
“Talking to myself makes me feel less alone in the house,” Bryar reasoned softly, pattering in her fluffy blue knee socks to the kitchen down the hall.
Pastries and mostly-creamer coffee made a decent breakfast. If you could call it breakfast at two in the afternoon. She shrugged.
Halfway through a cherry turnover, Bryar saw it.
Clean, white, pinned neatly by a vase of soft purple orchids. She stood abruptly from the breakfast nook and clambered awkwardly over to the counter.
The note read: “Be back at 2. You’ll be okay until then, won’t you?”
Bryar just gaped for a moment. Then she felt a slow grin playing around her lips. She couldn’t resist a good mystery. “Granny… I just told the house you weren’t coming back. You can’t play tricks on us like this.”
Really, though. Who could have gotten into the house and left the note? The number of people with access to the place was quite limited.
Well, if anyone knew what to do… “Maverick.” She swiped up the screen on her phone — a picture of her attempting to give him a piggyback ride — and was greeted once more by the message she’d never responded to earlier.
Morning, love
He knew her so well. Knew she’d wake up in the middle of the afternoon. Knew she’d been brightened by his words like the sunshine that came through the window.
Her fingers danced across the keyboard in invitation.
Want in on a little puzzle?
His reply flashed on the screen within seconds — something she both loved about him and mocked him incessantly for.
Always
She grinned, snapped a photo of the note, and sent it to him. The little typing dots appeared…
Hmm… you recognize that handwriting?
It was a good question. It looked familiar…
Actually, it looks a lot like Granny’s?
She chuckled when she read his response: WHAT
“We can get to the bottom of this,” Bryar told herself firmly. “All I’ve gotta do is… get into Granny’s study. No big deal.”
The key was… in the little office, second floor. Right? Right.
Bryar sent off one final text before setting her phone down on the table, next to a half-eaten pastry and long-cold coffee.
You should come over. I could use the extra pair of eyes 😉
It should be easy to find a handwriting sample to compare to the note — the study still had all Granny’s papers and documents, her books, probably planners and maybe even an old journal or two. The hard part was… Granny’s study was locked. Bryar had never been very clear on why. But so it was. Perhaps, though, the key — an ornate old thing with a lion’s head on one end — was still in its old hiding place: the desk. And with any luck, Mave would be there in under ten minutes — he had a bad habit of pushing the speed limits — to help her with the hunt.
Bryar trotted up the stairs — her current bedroom, as well as the kitchen, were on the first floor — to the office, and pushed the slightly-ajar door fully open. “Where are you hiding, little key?” She began to rummage vaguely through papers and little towers of books and behind picture frames containing childhood memories.
The key was not to be so easily discovered.
Moving to the big oak desk, Bryar was about to rifle through all the tiny drawers on its front but was halted by another neat square of white paper.
“Stop looking inside my desk!”
Just like the silly notes Granny used to leave all over the house for her when she was a little girl…
And the same handwriting as before — precise, blocky letters, so much like Granny’s.
Footsteps behind her were the last straw — prepared to blundgeon her own grandmother’s ghost back into oblivion, Bryar whirled with an elephant-shaped paperweight to face the intruder.
“Whoa there, just me.” Maverick stepped into the room, hands and eyebrows slightly raised in surrender.
“Ah, whoops.” Bryar set the elephant down gently, mentally apologizing for her violent intentions, and stepped forward into Mave’s warm hug.
“I’ve missed you,” he murmured into her hair.
“Me too. But, you know, for you. I’ve missed you, not myself. You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
They stood that way, feeling each other’s heartbeat, feeling whole.
“I love your outfit, by the way,” he said, stepping back to look at her.
Bryar looked down. “Oh. Right. Um. I’m not wearing pants.”
He nodded seriously. “I kinda figured.”
Bryar stared at him for a moment, tall and lovely and so intellectual when he wore those black-framed glasses. “Your eyes,” she whispered, “are so incredibly brown.”
He smiled and reached out to cup her face. “And yours are so wondrously blue.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead, softly. “You know, I wouldn’t worry about the no-pants because the chunky sweater thing is such a look, and it comes almost to your knees. Plus it’s close enough to sweater season that you’re just getting a headstart anyway.” He let his hands fall from her face to grab both her hands. His thumb caressed the square-cut diamond on the ring finger of her left hand and grinned in that way that made her knees wobbly. “There’s also that small detail that we’re engaged, so… I’m okay with seeing you without pants now and then.”
“See, that’s exactly what I said! Except not exactly all of that–”
“Oh? Said it to who?”
Bryar felt her cheeks turn red.
“You’ve been talking to yourself again.” He sounded amused, but the worry was there as well. The way everyone seemed worried about her these days.
Bryar shrugged. “Yes. Does that make me sound like a crazy person?”
“You aren’t crazy, Bryar.”
“Really?” She raised her eyebrows at him.
“Okay, fine. Maybe you are a little crazy. But we’re the same brand of crazy — and I adore you.”
“Okay. Sometimes I just feel like a 26-year-old college dropout who’s living in her dead grandmother’s mansion because she’s broke, you know?”
He laughed and the sound was warm and strong and alive. “I have no idea why.”
Bryar closed her eyes and smiled, allowing the worries to slip away for a moment.
“So, we’ve got a mystery on our hands,” Maverick said after a moment.
Bryar nodded vigorously. “Right, I was in here looking for the key, but look.”
“Another note…” He reads it under his breath. “Same handwriting?”
“Yes! At least, yeah. It looks just like the one from earlier. On the counter.”
“Well, this is exciting. My text back to you was also very epic. I said, ‘sounds illegal, I’m in.’ Isn’t that cool?”
“Very. I don’t have my phone on me. It’s on the counter, I think. Here, we can… when we find the key, we can go back downstairs and compare the two notes to make sure.” She handed him the note. “Hang onto this, I don’t have pockets. Because no pants.”
“Right.”
“So we need to find this key…” Bryar began to open the drawers of the desk one by one. Lots of pens. A checkbook. Stapler. Planner. More old photographs. Folders brimming with files.
“What does it look like?” Maverick asked from the other side of the room, where he was examining the bookshelf.
“Like this,” Bryar breathed, holding up the gold lion-headed key.
“You found it.”
“Let’s go.”
“What room are we breaking into again?”
“Granny’s study. Third floor. It’s always locked. Also we aren’t breaking in.”
“We are definitely breaking in. This is the most exciting moment of my life.”
“Really?”
“Okay aside from the day I proposed to the love of my life. See, she’s my best friend and really hot–”
“Oh my gosh, stop rubbing your perfect love life in my face.”
“What can I say, man, I have it all.”
“Sickening.”
Maverick shrugged and grinned at her. “Let’s go, baby.”
“First, we need the other note. And my phone.”
“Split up!” Maverick shouted, bounding out the door and thundering noisily down the staircase.
Bryar shook her head. “What a guy.” Softly, she pattered up the stairs, stopping in front of the thick door of Granny’s old study. Just to make sure, she wiggled the knob. Locked. Just like always. Fully of secrets. Breathing mystery. Not creepy old dark house secrets but soft warm whispers from the past. Cozy secrets.
Mave’s footfalls preceded him and Bryar turned to smile as he came up the stairs, panting a little. “Here. Your phone… and the… the other note.”
Bryar took the phone and held up the note in her hand next to the one he held. “Definitely the same.”
“But not definitely Granny’s?”
“I’m not sure… could be. That’s why we need to get into the study. I’ll be able to find something she wrote in here.”
“You’ve got the key?” he asked.
“Right here. Ready?”
“Wait.”
“What?”
Framing the side of her face, Mave leaned down to capture her lips with his. He started to pull away, but Bryar wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his flannel chest. “I love you.”
Maverick had a smile in his voice as he brushed her hair back, sweeping it into a loose ponytail with the spare hairtie he always wore on his wrist in case she needed it. “I love you more than life, Bryar Rose.”
She released him. “Okay, let’s do this.”
Inserting the key into the lock with a heavy clunk, Bryar turned the lion’s head and pushed the door smoothly, silently, open.
She stepped through the doorway, onto the thick carpet of the study.
“Sweetie? What are you doing in here?”
The voice, so familiar, came from behind Granny’s big writing desk. Bryar looked up, expecting halfheartedly to see her grandmother. Instead, her eyes locked onto the slim approaching figure of her older sister.
“Cecilie… why… what are you…?”
Bryar’s sister crossed the room and enveloped Bryar in a gentle hug. “You saw my note? You weren’t worried? I counted on the fact that you’d sleep in late again…”
“Yes. No… I mean, I saw the note.”
“Okay.” There was an awkward pause. “Do you need something?”
“No. I just… we were… Mave and I have been… all over the house… there were clues, like a puzzle or a mystery, like someone wanted us to find–”
“Bryar.” Cecilie cut in firmly but her voice was kind and sad. “I know it’s been really, really hard for you with Maverick’s death and everything and that you don’t want to be living here with me, but it really is the best thing right now, for…”
Cecilie’s voice faded out of focus. In her hand, Bryar’s phone lit up. A text message… from Maverick. She closed her eyes, and smiled.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
TADAAAAAAAA!
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