Welcome to Forever by Nathan Tavares

Author:Nathan Tavares
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan

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We wander from our grassy alcove back to the manor, close but not touching. None of the other residents seem to notice or care that someone new rolled in—or they’re still avoiding me. I can’t find Minou, not that I have a chance to shake Gabe and look for her. Not that I’d know what to say. Seth scraped together a version of my dead husband and I’m supposed to be happy?

An editor promised me, once, we can make you happy. I can hear her voice like a puff of mint tea, only I can’t remember where I was.

Anyway, I have to show Gabe around. Here’s the dining room. Here’s the sunroom. Here’s the creaky front hallway where the other residents pretend that I’ve faded into the wallpaper. We skip lunch since we snacked through our re-intro session, and I watch him paint with watercolors at an easel out of the corner of my eyes in the greenhouse during Free Exploration. His lips, his eyebrows drawn into lines. I don’t feel much like painting, seeing as how I can’t hold the brush straight. Past the greenhouse glass walls, a squadron of sparrows swarm and swoop after a hawk, chasing it into the trees. A war of birds.

I must’ve spaced out. Next thing I know, he’s nudging me and bobbing his chin to his canvas, where he’s painted a giant blue dick.

“Whaddya think?” he asks.

“Masterpiece.” I hope my smile pokes out of my eyes.

We clean up the paints and then he looks at me like, what now?

Yeah, what now? I should be happy but my heart echoes like sparrow wingbeats in my empty chest. Flo breezes in just in time and says something to Gabe about getting him set up in his room, and I hate how I can breathe easier once he’s gone.

I hide in my room through dinner because I’m a coward, afraid of a stranger who’s wearing my husband’s face. Who could be him, who could follow me everywhere and tell me endlessly how much he loves me, if I tell him to.

Admin mode. Like I own him. Like he’s living just for me. All I’m asking for is your everything, is that so hard? There’s a razor behind the smile on Gabe’s face—the real Gabe—in my picture on the bureau. Ask and you got it, Foxy.

I shouldn’t have skipped dinner. I shouldn’t have stuck my head in the sand. But what do I do now that the moon’s spotlighting over the marsh? Knock on every bedroom door in the manor, looking for Gabe? Edited scenes swarm around my head with how this night should’ve gone. Insert > bedframe-breaking reunion, falling asleep in each other’s arms, royalty-free soundtrack.

So I try to sleep. Try. What Flo said before when she, Seth, and Gabe popped up at my door is a threat that slips through the shadows in my room. Oh, hon. You deserve it.

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