17 Feb The Seven Stones

A year and a day after my wife died, I went on a date.

The night before had been—not good. In fact, there’s no sense in being coy. Let’s call it what it was.

Bad. Awful.

I’d been okay, you know? Not perfect, maybe not even great, but it had been a year. I’d thrown myself into work, hobbies, and life. I didn’t even think about her every day anymore. Most days, sure, but not every day. I thought I could see a light at the end of the tunnel. I was going to come out of it different, but I was going to get through.

And then it was the anniversary of her death, and I was not okay.

It was the word “anniversary” that got me more than anything. We’d had twenty-three anniversaries together, me and her. I’d had one without her, the month after she had died, and that had been a bad day as well. I knew it was going to be, though. I planned for it. I had friends over. We celebrated her. We got tastefully drunk and told stories. I cried a lot. They were all there for me. It was a hard day, but I didn’t have to do it alone.

This one—it had been an entire year. A lot of those friends had moved on. I don’t blame them. It’s got to be tough inviting your widowed friend out to all of the things that couples do. They let me third- and fifth-wheel for a long time, and I appreciated it. After a while, most of them started dropping hints that they had a friend I might like to meet, or maybe I should talk to that woman at the bar, or things like that.

I wasn’t ready, and I didn’t exactly know how to say that. So we kind of just saw each other less and less.

I should have called them up on the anniversary of her death. They would have come, any of them. Instead, I sat alone at home until the quiet and the weight of the house got to be too much, and then I got drunk. Painfully, dangerously drunk.

I went through our wedding album until I couldn’t see the pictures through my tears. Then I threw it against the wall for being blurry. The album broke, metal rings springing open to throw pictures everywhere. I punched the wall for breaking the album, and then kicked it for hurting my hand. I slammed another drink and screamed until my throat hurt, then drank more to cool my ragged vocal cords. I raged at my wife for leaving me, at myself for not dying first, at the world for allowing such things to happen.

I don’t know when I finally passed out. A long time after I blacked out, unfortunately. I woke up in the morning still fully clothed, with a killer headache and a throat that felt like I’d been strangled. The house was an absolute shambles. I’d smashed pictures to the floors, punched holes in the walls and thrown furniture across the room. Bottles and glasses littered the kitchen counter and floor. Most were empty. Some were broken. Shards of glass were everywhere.

I downed a handful of aspirin and about a pitcher of water and started straightening up. I righted the chairs, re-hung the pictures and carefully swept up all of the glass I’d strewn about the house, marveling at the fact that I hadn’t cut my feet open at any point during my drunken demolition. I was truly lucky not to have hurt myself.

I was carrying the dustpan outside to the trash can when I found the next surprise. In my backyard, arranged in a circle about four feet across, were seven oval stones sticking about two feet out of the ground. They were all uniform in size and had been hammered deep into the dirt. One of them was cracked straight down the middle, presumably from being hit. The others all had scuff marks along the top, but were still whole.

My toolshed door was open and my sledgehammer was lying next to the stones, so I supposed I was the one who had put them there. I didn’t remember doing it. I couldn’t even remember seeing those stones anywhere before. I hoped that whoever I’d taken them from didn’t miss them. I pulled on one experimentally, but it was stuck in tight. I was going to have to get the shovel and dig these out if someone wanted them back.

As I was standing in the circle examining the stones, something caught my attention over by the toolshed. There was someone standing inside, past where the light reached. I could just barely make out the humanoid shape. They didn’t move at all. They just stood watching me.

“Hello?” I called out. There was no response. After a moment, I tried again.

“Hey, you can’t be in there. This is private property.”

Still no answer, nor even any movement. I stepped out of the circle of stones, intending to head over there, but as I passed the edge, the morning sun briefly blinded me. By the time I got the sun out of my eyes, the figure in the toolshed was gone.

I thought about going over there anyway to look around and see if they were still hiding inside, but then I thought: what if they were? I was in no mood to get into a fight with some weirdo. They knew they’d been caught. Better to give them space to run away. None of my tools were worth any real money. Certainly, nothing worth risking my life over.

I’d come back to lock the toolshed once I was sure they’d bailed out. In the meantime, I was going to have some more aspirin, another glass of water and maybe a short nap.

I woke up to my phone buzzing. I checked to see who was calling, but there was nothing but a notification from an app:

You Have A Match!

The logo was a closed eye. I didn’t recognize it. I clicked on the notification.

The loading screen said Blindly, with a picture of two people covering their eyes. It was clearly a dating app. I had no idea how it had gotten on my phone. Then again, I didn’t know much about what had happened last night. I was lucky to still have a phone.

The message that popped up had the name of a restaurant in town, along with the current date and a time of 7:30 PM. There was no information on who had sent it, only the option to accept or deny.

I thought of a hundred reasons to reject the date. I almost hit “deny.” Then I looked at the holes I’d punched in my walls, at the pictures with no glass in their frames, and at my generally disheveled house.

I tapped “accept.”

Your Date Will Be Wearing a Yellow Top or Dress, the app told me. You Will Wear a Blue Shirt. The Rest Will Happen…Blindly!

A bit gimmicky, but clearly I’d found it compelling enough last night. I got up in search of a blue shirt to wear.

She was waiting for me when I got to the restaurant. I saw her as soon as I walked in the door. Her dress was the color of corn silk in the sun. She looked like summer. She smiled when she saw me and held up the Blindly app screen questioningly. I nodded and walked over to join her.

I couldn’t describe the evening. It was easy in a way I hadn’t ever expected. I thought I would be awkward, lost, maybe even angry. I knew I wasn’t ready, no matter what my friends had thought. It wasn’t fair to subject someone else to me.

And yet—it was wonderful. She was light. She was happy. She was sincere. I don’t know what we talked about. I only know that time flew by and I enjoyed every moment of it.

She was nothing like my wife. I couldn’t have stood it if she were. But we connected the way only my wife and I ever had. We had dinner and drinks, and then we walked around the city, talking about everything and nothing, just enjoying each other’s presence.

“I wish this night didn’t have to end,” she said.

“It doesn’t,” I told her, surprised at my own boldness.

She smiled and pushed me teasingly. “How can we have a second date if the first one doesn’t end? Besides, I’m sure you have things you need to do.”

I thought about the state of my house. “There are a few things I could patch up.”

“Patch them up, then.” She smiled. “I’ll see you soon.”

It was nearly midnight by the time I parked in my driveway. As I was walking toward the front door, I heard a resounding crack from behind the house. I circled around to see what it was.

Moonlight flooded the yard, revealing it to be still and empty. My toolshed door yawned open, a black portal into nothingness. The seven stones stood in their ring. A second one was cracked, split from top to bottom. My sledgehammer was exactly where I had found it that morning.

The noise could have been the stone splitting in two. If so, what had caused it to crack?

I went to bed unsettled, but I fell fast asleep as soon as I lay down.

I spent the next day actually cleaning the house. The drunken damage I’d done was only the most visible of the problems. Counters were dusty. Clothes weren’t put away. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d really cleaned the kitchen. The house, like me, had just been sort of generally coasting along. And also like me, it had been slowly slipping into disrepair.

I scrubbed. I swept. I cleaned. And the house was much better for it.

I needed to do something about the holes I’d put in the walls. I thought I’d had some drywall patches around, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. It was possible that I’d put them out in the toolshed. For some reason, the thought of going out there to find them made me shiver.

It wasn’t that unreasonable. It was getting late in the day, and I never had gone to make sure that my uninvited visitor had gone. For all I knew, they’d been camping out in my shed. I really didn’t want to barge in on a crazy person right now. I was exhausted from all of the cleaning. Besides, the patches probably weren’t even there.

I knew my rationales were a little thin. I didn’t care. I went to the hardware store to buy new drywall patches. I left the toolshed as a problem for the next day.

The walls were cleaned, patched, mudded and ready for repainting by the time I went to bed that night. The house was the cleanest it had been since my wife died. I felt proud. I felt tired.

I was asleep by ten PM. But I woke up exactly at midnight to a crack that echoed across the backyard. It had the painful resonance of breaking bone.

I crept to the window to peer out. Just as before, the yard was silent and devoid of movement, but a third stone had split. I could see faint moonlight spilling through the jagged fracture.

I watched out of the window for a long time. Nothing moved. Nothing changed.

Eventually I ventured into the backyard with a flashlight. I shone it around vaguely, but nothing moved other than the shadows. They leapt and danced, telling incoherent stories.

I could not see into the toolshed. I walked closer, passing through the circle of stones as I did so. As soon as I was inside, I could see the figure in the doorway again. I stopped dead in my tracks.

“You can’t be here!” I said. My voice sounded shrill.

The figure hung back from the entrance, shrouded in darkness. It did not move. It was tall. Its head and face were hidden by the doorframe. It was the general shape of a human. I stared at it, trying to make out details, but they were hidden in the gloom.

Something disturbed me about its feet. The longer I looked, the more convinced I became that they did not touch the ground.

I backed away, unnerved. My view of the figure ended as soon as I left the circle of stones. I could still feel its presence. I just couldn’t see it when I wasn’t between the stones.

I thought about going over to the toolshed, shining my light inside and seeing what was truly there. Instead, I went back into the house and locked the door.

The next day, I painted. I had planned to just paint over the patches, but I didn’t know where the matching paint was, and once I was buying new paint anyway, I decided to go all in. I redid the entire house in bright colors. I taped and tarped and rolled and brushed until I was dizzy from the fumes and could barely lift my arms. At the end, the house looked vibrant and new. It felt like a weight was lifting.

I tumbled into bed before eight o’clock. I was sure that nothing could wake me.

That brittle crack brought me out of a dead sleep in an instant. I didn’t have to check my phone to know that it was midnight on the dot.

I didn’t go outside. I didn’t even get out of bed. I just lay there picturing that empty toolshed door, and hoping that whatever was inside wasn’t picturing me in return.

I woke to a text:

How’s your patching?

Patchy, I sent back. Want to get breakfast?

I checked the time and sent a follow-up: Lunch?

She was as vibrant as she had been on our first date. Her sundress was as light and flirty as her pleased grin when she spotted me.

“It’s good to see you again,” she said. “I thought you might be gone.”

“Where would I go?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes people just go.”

“Well, I’m here to stay,” I said.

She gave me a smile that spoke of secrets and sadness. “No one’s here forever.”

I didn’t like the feeling that comment gave me. I let the topic drop.

The darkened moment passed like a cloud over the sun, and then the day was fresh and light again. I took her to my favorite spots in town, the parks and river and bars, all of the places that had ever meant anything to me. I don’t know how we packed it all in. It was a lifetime summarized in a single day. She was there, appreciative of it all, but somewhere along the way I realized I was my own real audience. I saw, too, that she had known that all along, and enjoyed being along for the ride.

Afternoon faded into evening, which dropped rapidly into night. I lost track of time entirely. I was shocked when I checked my phone and saw that it was three in the morning. In the back of my head, I had been waiting for that deathly crack to warn me of another passing midnight. It made no sense. I was miles from home. Still, I had expected it, and it was a vast relief to find that it had not happened. It was nothing supernatural. It was just a sound.

“You look happy,” she said.

“Something I was worried about turned out to be no big deal,” I said. There was no darkness when she was there.

We didn’t sleep that night. It didn’t seem to be important. We danced through the night until dawn brought back the sun, and somewhere in there my endless day of reminiscence flowed easily into doing all of the things I had always meant to do. We toured art galleries, explored old shops, and found our way into all of the nooks and crannies that the town had to offer. It was seamless and effortless, and when we found ourselves back at my place at the end of it all, it was the only natural progression that could have happened.

I showed her my house with the same pride I had showed her the town, and knew that again I was showing myself. The damage had been repaired. The paint brightened the rooms. The house was good. It was whole.

“Show me the stones,” she said.

It was dark outside. The toolshed was still open, darkness on darkness. “I don’t want to.”

“It’s okay,” she said softly, and took my hand. I took courage from her touch. We went to see the stones.

Five of them were cracked now. We walked toward them and stood in the center of the circle. I could see the thing in the toolshed watching me. It did not move. It was waiting for me to come to it.

We looked into the darkness of the toolshed together, she and I.

“Why is this happening?” I asked.

“It’s almost midnight,” she said. She knelt and touched an unbroken stone, a gentle caress. It snapped brutally. I felt the impact shudder down my spine.

She stood and faced me again. “You have one more day, if you need it.”

“What happens after that?”

She nodded to the toolshed. “It comes for you.”

“And if I don’t need the day?”

She smiled that smile of secrets, the one I had seen for a moment before. “Then you go to it.”

“That’s not much of a choice.”

“It’s the only choice there ever is. You can run from your life, or you can embrace it. It’s as true of the end as any other part.”

“I’m not ready to die.”

She touched my neck as gently as she’d touched the sixth stone. “You died a week ago.”

I turned my eyes to the toolshed, and the thing that hung waiting in the darkness within. I could feel its anticipation. And finally, I could feel my own too.

I left her in the circle and walked forward without dread. I stepped through the darkness of the toolshed door.

“I’ve been waiting,” it whispered, without breath.

I embraced what waited for me beyond.