Short Story Workbook

Susan Roberts

She came to be at 25, at least that's when she noticed she was. It happened all of a sudden when somebody looked at her. She was sitting in a bus, cold and damp from the rain, and he sat beside her and she saw his stare. His pupils, intense and drilling, became a mirror and suddenly she came to realize her own being.

He who stared and sat beside her, a crumpled person in shades of brown and gray, became, consequently, the second person she noticed. Looking right back at him, she noticed a message written on his hand. It was smudged in black ink but she could see that it said 'be enthused' and being as she was, now present and actual, she felt inclined to inquire. He raised his blanched eyebrows and looked up, looked down, looked back at her, licked the sleeve of his jumper and scrubbed at the writing until his hand turned pinkish gray. Then he smiled, a long streak of vibrance on his otherwise barren head. He asked her name and told her he liked going to the theater. And that it was his birthday. He looked older than 27. She felt newer than 25.

After some days, she noticed she liked holding his hand and so she held it and sometimes he kissed her. She noticed he smiled when he looked at her, the vibrance now more than a streak. After a week it spread to his eyes and she saw they were bright blue. He took her to the theater and pointed out things she'd never noticed before about Beckett and Pinter and some others that she hadn't heard of. They bought a globe and she spun it and he stopped it, with his finger, at the place they should go to, even if only in their imaginations. It landed in the North Pacific Ocean so she spun again. He told her she enthused him and he stopped writing on his hands.

After some time, she noticed that when he thought no one was watching, he looked up and closed his eyes and breathed slowly. She wondered if he was in the North Pacific, trying to keep afloat. He didn't say. So she carried on holding his hand, and occasionally talking about Pinter and her imaginings. That always made him smile. Later she noticed he was getting smaller and the blue in his eyes started fading. He became more crumpled until eventually, he said he was going to stop. And he'd known for a while, since that day that she'd first noticed herself.

And he did stop and they wrote his name on a stone so that people would know that he had been. Knowing already, as she did, that he had been and likewise that she still was, she found it difficult keeping afloat, stuck out there in the North Pacific. Lost as she was, she went to the theater, for the first time alone, and on her way home, she wrote 'be enthused' on her hand in black ink and tried not to smudge it.