1. Yes, three times. Three times I begged you to stay. You stood there and you listened but you did not hear. You left me. You left us. You walked away from yourself, I’d say. And I knew it was true when I saw you in the restaurant that night. Your face was a different face. Your smile a different smile. And all I could see were traces of who I remembered you were. In your hands. In your eyes. But not really there or looking back at me.
2. She poured cold water into a small plastic tumbler. The house was quiet and the windows were open. In the silence swallowing cold water, washing dishes by hand, she dreaming of where she might go if only he would come find her.
3. “You are my heart,” he told her. He placed the pen down and took her hand. Looking down at her small fingers wrapt completely inside his palm, “Yes, I suppose I am,” she said, “especially if you mean in the way that I only beat for you.” After lifting her eyes to his, his thumb gently to her chin, he followed her breathing, “Yes, that too,” he smiled, “and I hope you will never stop.”
4. He was going to run away. He’d thought it over, considered the entire thing. There was no option for him here. His horse though. He couldn’t think of her now. Each time he’d tried to leave, he’d caught himself on the image of her waiting their in the stables. She’d need to be fed. She’d need to be walked. And as much as he could barely stomach one more day there, he just couldn’t manage to leave when she was on his mind. No one would care if she died starving in the stable with snow matted in her hair or mold growing around her. If he left, he would be leaving her to die. So he just couldn’t think of her. He wouldn’t. He packed his bags and bit his tongue and tuned out everything inside. If he was going to live, it wouldn’t be possible here. The horse that had kept him alive all these years would never see him again. The memory of her face in the stables would become a shuddering thought to him all of his life.
5. “No, no, no. I refuse. I won’t hear it anymore. The man is a stubborn, angry, callous fool. He’s brilliant and charming and utterly hopeless. I won’t sit and listen while she defends him when she has never been recipient of his deciet.” Ruthie understood why her mother loved such a man; she just wasn’t going to love him again herself.
The Five Writer 