SmokeLong Quarterly

When he got home, she was gone.

At first, he wasn’t aware of anything amiss. The dog snoozed in the yard; the mail lay on the dining room table. The furniture, which he had inherited, stood in place.

He made himself some coffee (French pressed) and carried his cup into the living room. That’s when he began to intuit something off in the air, to sniff the delicate absence of her scent.

His eye was inevitably drawn to one of his earliest prizes. The Fire Prevention Week Essay Award had tilted in its frame, so he moved to straighten it. Then he saw that the Certificate of Excellence in Punctuation lay crooked. Further, his letter of selection into Volume XXXIII of America’s Poets on Either Side of the Mississippi had fallen, and the actual tome ($19.95; $22.95 with a gilded frontispiece) had been shelved upside down!

Something was noticeably different about the light.

Then he saw the letter, propped against the photograph of him accepting his Trophy of Good Standing (luckily his misspelled name was out of focus in the shot), written in her inimitable (but somewhat larger than usual) hand:

She had had enough; she spelled it out for him: I can no longer bear to live beneath the twenty-seven tiny shadows of your accomplishments.