Nobody Remembers

She reads me the way you'd read to someone dying, except nobody is dying, and she isn't reading to anyone.

Nine-forty, every night. The train shakes the glass and she opens me and starts at the beginning, because I have no beginning she hasn't worn smooth.

Sixty-one years. She has never turned to the last page. I know why. So does she, which is the problem.

Last night she stopped halfway.

“You've heard this,” she said. Not to me. To the room. To the chair.

The room didn't answer. It never does. That's what makes it a room.

But I answered. I've been answering for sixty-one years, in a voice she can only hear when she's almost asleep, and every time she tells herself it was the kettle.

Last night she didn't tell herself anything. She set me down open, spine up, the way you put down a person you're finished with.

Then she picked me back up.

An outtake from my novel. Chapter one is here: https://paper.wf/jaylee/chapter-one