A Prize Winning Short Story by Lucie Casinghino
Morning sunlight seeps through a crack in your curtains. You open your eyes and look around your room. There’s the same floating dust particles in the sunlight, the same clothes scattered on the ground here and there, the same wallpaper applied years and years ago. You sit up, stretching your arms and letting out a sleepy yawn. You rub the guck from the corners of your eyes. You throw the covers off you, then you realize that maybe you should have just gotten up, instead of making a mess of your sheets and blankets by throwing them. Your toes clench involuntarily as your feet touch the cold wood floors with paint stains covered by a rug. You walk downstairs, stepping on the creaky fifth step, same as always.
You make your way to the kitchen and open up the fridge. You brace yourself for the smell of rotting vegetables that never seems to go away even though so much elbow grease and cleaning supplies went into that darn fridge. You grab blindly for the milk that you bought yesterday at the local grocery store. There is a picture on the side of the milk carton with a couple sentences underneath. It has the words, “MISSING” in big black letters over the picture. You’re surprised, you haven’t seen one of those on a milk carton in a while. The picture is a picture of you. You’re not surprised by this, yet it’s somehow a bit of a relief when you see it.
You sense someone standing behind you, the hairs standing up on the back of your neck. You do not turn around, but stand there quietly, reading the ingredients list on the milk carton. “Who knew there were so many things in milk?” you mutter to yourself. You sigh, brushing hair out of your eyes; you wish you hadn’t gotten your hair cut like that, it looks ridiculous, people gave you compliments but they were just being nice. At least they were nice; sometimes people aren’t nice. You realize that you have been saying this out loud, and not, in fact, talking to yourself in your head. But really doing either of those things might be considered strange. You sense the figure behind you move, and for a second you remember something, a gesture.
Years and years ago, you were a child and did not realize the truth. You see an ice cream cone falling to the floor and you’re crying when it falls. You recall your mother wiping away your tears gently. You asked her if you could get another, she says no, that it’s done and gone, and it’s time to move on sweetheart, and sometime it’s best just to let things like this go. She tells you that it’s time to leave anyways.
You ponder all the things you haven’t done, when you told yourself there would always be more time. The things you never got to say. You think about saying everything to this shadowy figure, telling them your secrets, your fears, your hopes and dreams never accomplished, and what a moment of oh so sweet soliloquy that would be to just let it all out. But instead, you simply mutter listlessly to the dark kitchen with a broken light that you haven’t had the time to fix because you assumed time would never be in short supply, and to that shadowy figure that you somehow know all too well. You’re still clutching the milk in your hand. “Time to leave anyways” you say. The milk clatters to the floor.