Broken Glass

From several paces away he noticed something glinting in his path. Impossible to tell what it was, the origin of a beam of pure white light directed right into Keith's eye. He moved and it was just a speck of something shiny on the beach, but as he took his next step, midstride, it caught the right angle and nearly blinded him again. He closed the rest of the distance quickly, and as his shadow fell over the object, he reached down, fingers plunging into the sand.

"It's all in how you twist it," said Melissa. When she was explaining something to him she took on a whole different manner, a certain posture, a tone of voice.

Keith would never admit to her that he liked it when she adopted that didactic tone, even though it bordered on patronizing -- to see the enthusiasm pouring out of her that, even if it wasn't focused on him, even if he only made for a convenient audience, was at least projected in his general direction.

He stood up, his fingers forming a cage cradling the object between them: a concave shard of glass.

"What is it?" his wife asked, breaking off from what she'd been talking about.

Keith knew almost before he knew. On one side the glass was polished, and its curve seemed to fit his thumb perfectly. His fingers ran over the outer surface; it was scalloped and worn slightly rough, sea-glasslike. The edges were no longer fracture-sharp, although they were far from dull.

He didn't answer the question. He was thinking instead of the first time he met Melissa.

He was on his way back from the library, staring at the book in his hand, not really reading it but hoping that he could absorb enough from the light bouncing off its pages to be able to dredge up the right words in the right order on the midterm. She was leaning against the door to her room, the one before his, left leg stretched across the narrow hallway, right knee pulled up supporting right elbow. Keith avoided tripping over her but couldn't manage to stop the book from falling.

She jerked her leg back from where Abnormal Psychology had landed. "Sorry," he muttered. Keith picked up the book, but something prevented him from continuing on.

"Sit around here often?" he added, just to have something to add. In half a semester, Keith had hardly seen his next door neighbor. Well, he'd sometimes run into Julie, her roommate, but of the other individual advertised on the construction-paper-and-magic-marker sign that was posted on their door, he'd seen hardly any evidence.

"Not exactly." She leaned a little to the right, and he could see a wire clothes hanger dangling from the door knob. It was wrapped in a thin green plastic sleeve and had been stretched out into an elongated diamond shape.

"Ah." He rocked back on his heels. "Well," he gestured at his room just next door. "Might be more comfortable to wait in here, if you want."

The girl got to her feet, and he took that to be a yes.

Keith had the good fortune to have a room to himself. The other individual advertised on the sign that used to adorn his own door had never materialized. The rumor was that he'd decided to forgo higher education in favor of joining the military, but who knew for sure? As Keith opened the door for Melissa (whose name he was not yet accustomed to using) and swept aside a quarter-circle of clutter on the floor, he almost wished he had a roommate to help tidy up the place, or at least to share the blame.

A conveniently absent roommate, he amended mentally.

Melissa stepped around the haystack of laundry he'd tossed earlier in the day. "Bitch took my hanger," she said, taking a seat on the trunk at the foot of his bed.

Keith did not know how to respond to this, the longest utterance he'd heard from the mysterious next-door girl. He tried to break down the stream of syllables into words, and then to recall if he had ever heard where she came from, whether there was some kind of dialect he was failing to decipher.

"I've had a really bad night," she elaborated, speaking more slowly this time.

"I'm sorry."

"Why, can you fix it?"

"I doubt it." Keith pulled a pair of sodas out of his fridge and opened one for her. "I don't even know what the problem is."

That night and early morning, he learned where she came from (Maryland), what she was thinking of studying ("Some kind of science or engineering -- something that uses math." "What about Math?" "Too abstract."), and how, less than an hour before he tripped over her, she'd come home after being dumped by her boyfriend ("Been together since eleventh grade, known each other since eighth. Guess we can't call ourselves high school sweethearts anymore.") only to find one of her hangers dangling from the door knob.

"Bitch took your hanger."

"Exactly. It was one of the good ones, too." She took a swig from her Coke.

Keith began to see quite a lot of Melissa, especially on nights when Julie felt the need for privacy, and Melissa often ended up sleeping in his room like she had that first night. She took his usual bed in the bottom bunk; he ended up in the top one, and after a few times Keith set it up with a spare set of sheets and a throw pillow. They talked late into the night, and when she drifted off he turned out the light and climbed up into bed. He woke in the morning when he heard the door close behind her, as the street lamps outside began to dim in the early sunlight. Even after Julie's romance had long since fizzled out, and Melissa no longer had hanger-based reasons for spending the night, they carried on the habit.

The next year Keith was living in a single again; Melissa had the room next door with her best friend Emily. The three of them became inseparable. In the fall of junior year, Emily and Keith fell into a relationship, so that often Melissa slept in Keith's room again, while he spent the night in hers with Emily.

Though it seemed natural enough at the time, Keith always had a feeling that he and Emily wouldn't last beyond college. They were good together, but not good enough to be worth putting themselves through the misery of long distance. But as it turned out, when the time came they were both looking at job offers in the same city, and it was easier to bring their relationship with them than to leave it behind. And as it turned out, Melissa was the one who went her own way.

Years after graduation, a business trip brought Keith to the city where Melissa lived. They met up at her office and she gave him the whirlwind tour, complete with lecture. She hadn't lost that tone of voice, he noted, as she picked up threads of some new material and unraveled them for him. He found himself wondering, as she described techniques of twisting fibers that apparently had implications far beyond his understanding, who was the beneficiary of her lessons when he wasn't around.

Afterward they went out for drinks. The bar was ambiently lit, but he remembered the way her hair cascaded from her head in long, lazy corkscrews. Like the unraveled threads she'd been talking about, only magnified, he thought.

"So, how are things?"

The tips of Melissa's fingers rested on top of her glass, rotating it by quarter turns on the varnished wood. "I don't know," she said at last.

Keith swallowed, and put down his own glass. "Not good?"

Melissa was quiet for another three quarter turns. "Remember what I used to say about what I wanted to do? In school, in life?"

"You wanted to use math."

"You'd think it wouldn't be that hard, wouldn't you? I like calculus, that's all. I just wanted to be able to integrate, Keith, and now ... now I feel like all I'm doing is disintegrating."

They both sat in silence, neither meeting the other's eye. "Anything I can do?" offered Keith at last. He could barely hear himself speak.

She laughed, a dismissive puff of breath followed by a sigh. Then, a smile formed slowly on her lips though her eyes got serious. "Buy me a Coke?"

"Sure." He sat up and began to raise a hand to signal the bartender.

She held his wrist. "Wait. In a bottle. The old glass ones, like you had back then." The bottles he'd pulled out of his dorm fridge the first time they met. They'd seemed quaint, sophisticated then. He didn't have a clue where to find one now. "You know, that's how I knew I'd like you."

"Because of Coke in a bottle?"

"More or less."

He looked at her. It seemed like the kind of comment that should make him shake his head, but her eyes were fixed on him, and he could not look away. "You're a very strange girl."

"I thought you knew."

He dug into the sand, scraping it aside and into a pile, hoping to hit something hard as he tunneled deeper.

"What are you looking for?"

Keith couldn't explain the fragment in his hand. It came from a bottle that carried a message from a distant shore, and at that second he felt sure that the message was meant for him.

"Broken glass," he breathed, holding it up for her to see while his other hand kept digging. "Making sure there isn't more, or someone could get hurt."

"If it's that deep, I don't think it'll bother anyone."

She was right. He swept the sand back into the hole and widened the search radius.

"Keith." Emily spoke softly in his ear, and put her hands on his, holding them still.

There are days -- not often, but some days -- when the fog is so thick in the morning Keith can barely get out the door. He swears he can hear the sound of a train approaching, like thunder coming closer, though as far as he knows there isn't a track around for miles. "Ghosts in the mist," Emily says, or perhaps she's saying "Ghosts in our midst," but he just nods. He sees Melissa, her slight form looking almost insubstantial in the haze, although she's solid enough. Made of atoms, like you, or like me. The moment before it happens the world goes muffled. The only sound is the rush of blood, like when you clap your hands over your ears. It is the quietest crash in history. An instant vacuum in that exact time and place, snatching a life, leaving behind broken glass.