Setting the Stage

 

The rays of sun streaming in the window highlighted the dust like fine punctuation laying across a paragraph.  This was a story that needed to be told.  Not with desk lamps and background music, but with the stillness of solitude found only in the untended rooms of adventure.

Dusty didn’t answer the phone.  She just sat there looking at it as it rang.  She wasn’t quite ready to start her life.   Finally done with school and now out on her own for the first time, she just wanted to sit there for a few minutes and enjoy it.  The walls in her apartment were still bare, but as she closed her eyes, she could see her photographs hanging on them.  Each one telling a story.  Her story.

The one she would hang in the hall was the one story she’d never tell.  It was also the one memory she could never forget.  That gray, Saturday at the lake, quietly drifting back to shore, alone.  The gasping, gurgling sounds that she could still hear kept shocking her awake at night, but she had to hang the picture.  She needed to know it was not a dream, it was all very real, and he was never coming back.