Meteors
By: Christopher P Jones
Tags: Short Story, Short Fiction, Relationships, Fiction, Life

Meteors

A Short Story

Image by the author

“I just want a year when nothing happens,” Karen said to me. “A whole year when all we do is eat and sleep, fix the house, and see no one. No disasters. No funerals, no weddings, nothing whatsoever. Just the two of us.”

To her list I might have added “no more false expectations” but I kept it to myself.

What had we seen? When we first visited, the door was barred with three pieces of plywood sloshed with graffiti. With the help of the agent we prised open the boards and scraped ourselves inside. Using a torch he flashed out the Victorian tiled floor, with its blue lilies and green intertwining stems, lying an inch deep in the dust and insects of twenty years dereliction. In a moment of stupidity or nostalgia, we’d seen in the warped walls and bug-gnawed timbres a project.

“Do you remember when we first visited?” Karen said later. “It had magic. We fell in love with it, didn’t we?”

“There was a spark,” I said, thinking of what people say when they talk about falling in love. So far we’d achieved too little, a mere half-home, surrounded by a snarl of wet brambles and flanked by two yellow skips sunken with debris. Just a few days before I’d been up to the loft and happened to put my hand against one of the beams. A fungus, like cotton wool, came off in strands on my fingers. When I aimed the torch I saw a family of mushroom stalks and sheets of fungus. I applied some force and the wood crumbled like biscuit. The whole roof was rotten.

I decided not to tell Karen. If we could just get our belief back, that spark, I thought, we could tackle anything. The truth was, I put off telling her because I thought the news would destroy us.

It was hard to say exactly how much the toil with the house had contributed to Karen’s loss of hope, and how much of it was for other reasons. I could never understand her feelings. As a way of escaping she had became scientific. She turned to books about physics and chemistry. She said she wanted to learn all the things she’d forgotten from school. She read every night in silence.

One day she came to me with a page from a newspaper. The picture showed a night sky, excessively milky with stars and comets. “I want to see this,” she said, spreading the page out flat on the kitchen table. “Can we see it? It would mean so much to me.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a meteor shower. We need to go somewhere dark. This town is lit up like a Christmas tree.”

“Let’s go and see it then.”

“But where?” Her voice brayed as if the evil of light pollution confounded her utterly.

So we decided to go camping, out where the streetlamps were few and the nights remote. I did some research to let her know I was on her side. I found out where the best places to view the shower were judged to be, and I asked some friends if they knew any places where we could camp.

Karen sat at the kitchen table hunched over the camping list whilst I made coffee and grilled some toast on the old, rocking cooker. The uncurtained window of our kitchen faced a back alley that nobody ever used, and above the wall I could see the feint misty glow of the moon. It was drizzling again, and I wondered how many shooting stars we would see if the weather stayed like this.

Karen said, “It’s cold tonight. Can you feel a draft?”

“I’ll leave the cooker on for a bit. That’ll warm the room.”

Then looking up at me she said desperately, “I can’t stand this house any longer!”

I had no answer. I couldn’t stand it either. I just knew we had to keep going with it. We had no money and no other choices.

“I pictured us living here,” she said. “I saw us happy. Not like this. It’s like we’ve been cursed.”

“We’re not cursed. We just need to find that spark again.”

I fished about under the grill to turn the toast over. Then I thought about our rotten roof. I didn’t know what to do about it. I should have told Karen but she would have said the house was unsound and insanitary, and that would be the very end of it.

“Tell me about the meteors,” I said to change the subject.

Karen sat up. “You want to know? Ok. Well, once a year the Earth passes through the tail of a comet called Swift-Tuttle. This comet has left a whole trail of debris, like a cloud of rubble. Earth crosses this cloud and bits of debris enter the atmosphere and burn up. That’s the Perseid meteor shower.”

I nodded my approval. “I’ll get some binoculars. We’ve got to make sure we get the very best view.”

Karen seemed delighted with my enthusiasm. I looked up again out of the uncurtained window and could hear the sound of rain hammering down like the shuffling movements of a tired washing machine. I began to fear for our chances of seeing the meteor shower; I said nothing however and brought the toast and coffee to the table.