Finals Assignment

August, 2005

For the first six days, there was only tortured sleep, horror movies projected on the backs of her eyelids. In the gnawing heat of a Texas late summer, long, dark hair clung to her neck like a heavy noose. Her sheets were soaked with perspiration, which led to a chill, which turned to a fever.

She was moved daily, carried by her father back and forth between her bedrooms. Her mother trickled broth down her throat as if she were a child with an illness. Her only sister, though close they were not, made every effort to cool and calm her. Still, she tossed and turned, disturbed never by the outside world, and always by her memories.



August 8, 2008

Three years later, Theresa Blair opened her eyes, sat up in bed, and lit her first cigarette of the day. Puffing listlessly, she glanced at the calendar hanging on the wall above her. August eighth.

She threw her legs over the side of the bed, knocking linens to the floor with the movement, and pushed herself to her feet. Gazing out her window, she was greeted with the welcome sight of sunshine. She stretched languidly, then left her little nook of a bedroom and ambled downstairs to the kitchen. Parents mercifully having moved out the previous year, Theresa lived alone, in the only home she’d ever known. They had given it to her as a generous parting gift, understanding about her that she wouldn’t consent to leave. Theresa was never good at letting go.

She reached into the bread drawer and pulled out a cinnamon-raisin loaf. After retrieving a couple of browned slices from the toaster, she poured a glass of orange juice, dropped her still-burning cigarette in a nearby ashtray, and took her breakfast to the dining room table. She ate without tasting her food, thoughts turned elsewhere, to another time, and not another place.



Paperback in hand and fresh cigarette dangling from her fingertips, Theresa meandered outside into the early afternoon heat of her backyard. Taking deep breaths of thick, moist air, followed by long drags of smoke, she made her way to her dock on the lake. She lay down on the warm wood and relaxed at the sound of the water lapping up against the concrete wall that contained it.

She opened up the worn book of poetry to a dog-eared page where the spine had cracked. Her eyes moved over the lines of her favorite poem slowly, carefully, and by the final lines of “Annabel Lee,” she was reading out loud, to herself, to Kevin, and she was soaring back and forth through the air.

“In her tomb by the sounding sea,” she recited with a smile, and glanced over her shoulder into confused denim-colored eyes.

“I don’t understand,” the eyes’ owner stated plainly.

“What’s to understand?” she asked with a shrug, extending her legs to push herself higher on the swing. “He loved her.”

“But she died,” he emphasized, sitting still on the swing next to hers. “Why didn’t he just…get over it?”

Theresa sighed exaggeratedly and rolled her eyes. “You can’t just ‘get over’ things like that. When you’re really in love, it’s forever.”

“Sweetie, I know love, and it’s anything but forever,” he replied with a smirk and a suggestive wink.

She screwed up her face in a grimace. “Your definition of love is disgusting,” she retorted. “Mine is --” she paused in thought. “Fantastical,” she decided, with a nod.

“Or unrealistic. However you’d like to phrase it.”

Theresa stuck her tongue out at him, now bringing her swing to a stop. “I’m going to fall in love like that someday,” she assured. “Just you wait.”

“I have no doubt that you will.” He smiled winningly, allowing her a moment of satisfaction before he added, “It seems like the sort of thing you’d get yourself into.”

She gave him a half-hearted glare, and then promptly broke into giggles. “It does, doesn’t it?” And with that lingering sentence, a now twenty-five year old Theresa pushed off the ground again.



Frantically, she thrust herself higher and higher into the air. It had been such a long time since she had seen Kevin. Ten years had passed, but she was still the same girl, still living the same life. It was just harder now.

She was brushing the leaves of a tall tree with the tips of her toes, exerting herself in a vain effort to take her mind off of the past. Her breathing became rapid, and her fingers were sore from grasping the thin ropes of the swing. With a final burst of energy, she gave herself the hardest push she could muster. She soared up into the air, legs thrashing against the tree, and was almost upside-down when she fell backwards, ten years into the past, and landed on the roof outside of her little dressing room.

Kevin leaned over close to her face to light her cigarette with the already-burning end of his. She sucked gently on the tip for a second, and then let a puff of smoke escape from between her lips. He withdrew, and took the glowing stick from his mouth.

Theresa was silent. He never stopped to see her without a reason. She waited to find what the reason was, knowing better than to press him.

“I just couldn’t go home today,” he said, acknowledging that she expected him to explain his visit.

Theresa nodded, urging him to continue.  

“I went out last night. To a party, you know? Fell asleep and didn’t wake up until noon,” he explained, staring out over the lake. “My mom’s already pissed at me, so I thought I’d give her some time to cool off, come visit my favorite neighbor.” With that, he turned to her at last, smiling the smile he knew would melt her heart. “Hope it’s alright.”

“You can come anytime. You know that,” Theresa assured him softly.

He looked away again. “I do know. Thank you.”

They were quiet again, both lost in thought. Theresa rested her chin on her knees, hugging her legs tightly to her body and letting her cigarette burn away slowly.

Unexpectedly, Kevin spoke again, startling Theresa into shaking ash all over her flip-flop clad feet. He didn’t notice, staring hard into the water below them as he exclaimed, “I just don’t want to be here!”

Theresa looked away, hurt, when he tried to make eye contact, and he turned her face to his. “I’m sorry, Theresa,” he said emphatically, “but I can’t stay here.”

She gave him a wry smile. “I knew that. But when are you leaving? Where do you plan to go?”

“I could live with my dad, I guess, but I’d rather go back to the city. This small town stuff…it’s not for me, you know?”

She gazed into space as she answered, “No, I don’t. I’ve always lived here. I’ve always loved it.”

Kevin understood her meaning. To be back in his home town, never making a wrong turn, to walk through his house in the dark and not hit a wall; that was what he missed. He envied Theresa, never taken from the world that she knew. “I’m going back someday. Soon,” he decided, lips forming a small smile.

He didn’t elaborate, leaving Theresa to wonder if perhaps he would take her with him. She banished the thought immediately, however. It was absurd to imagine living anywhere but home.

Kevin stood and climbed back through her window. Theresa followed and found herself alone in her dressing room, a woman of thirty.



She curled up into her daybed, eyes brimming with tears. The divan was empty without him, as was everything else. She contacted none of her family members, rarely ventured farther than her own backyard, and had no friends to speak of. He had become her life, but he wasn’t around to live for anymore.

She slipped into daydreams of him resting beside her in the late afternoon. It was her favorite pastime, and he would occasionally indulge her by joining her in sleep, wrapping an arm around her and planting a kiss on her neck before settling in. Theresa pressed her back into the imaginary Kevin, and he was real again, whispering that he loved her while pulling her closer.

He was quick to fall asleep, whereas Theresa stayed awake puzzling over his behavior. She certainly thought he loved her; he gave every indication that he cared, but things never went further than this in their seemingly platonic relationship. She could almost think of them as twins; sharing everything, but never in the way she wished.

He shifted to lie on his back, moving to the opposite side of the bed. She frowned and turned over, resting her head on his chest. With a sigh, she closed her eyes and attempted to clear her mind. She woke up twelve years later, vision still clouded by tears.




Theresa buried her face in a pillow, sobbing her broken heart out. The years had beaten her down, and she always lost, retreating into her God-forsaken past. She lay for a bit, sorrow turning to anger at the misfortune she had been faced with all those years ago. She shoved herself forcefully out of bed and stormed into her bathroom. She turned the sink’s cold water faucet fully on, and ducked down to meet the stream halfway as she brought it up to splash her blotchy face.

Rising from the basin, she glared at herself in the mirror. A dripping reflection stared back balefully, strands of sopping brown hair tinged with grey hanging down in front of its face. Theresa took note of the wrinkles forming around her eyes and mouth, of the looseness of her skin, and almost began crying again. Where was the young girl she so vividly remembered being? Where had the rosy tint of her cheeks, the fullness of her lips gone?

She recalled being pretty once upon a time. She recalled tying herself into tight-fitting corsets, flaunting the pale skin of her cleavage, and strapping her feet into impossibly high heels to lengthen her legs. Now she was aging, something she had fancied herself invulnerable to not so long ago. Or was it long ago? She wasn’t sure.

This was one of the few times she would welcome her memories, summoning them to take her back to when she was beautiful, and when she had a friend to assure her of it all the time. Back to when Kevin would snap pictures of her sleeping, eating, reading, and even captured in a rare dance of pure joy, spinning wildly and smiling with her eyes.

She fell to the floor of the den in laughter, Kevin not far behind. “That’s a great song,” she gushed, when she caught her breath at last.

“I enjoyed it,” he teased.

She gave him a gentle shove. “I was cute,” she informed him knowingly.

“Yeah, you really were,” he agreed. “As always.”

Theresa blushed and smiled shyly, then changed the subject. “Did you take my picture?”

“Yes, I did. Why?” he inquired.

She groaned exaggeratedly. “You take terrible pictures of me!” she complained. “You know I hate it when you do that.”

“I take great pictures!” he defended. “Besides, that was too good to miss.”

“Yeah, yeah, have your fun. Just don’t show anyone.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You wish.”

Theresa laughed again, and then a tear fell as she turned the page of the photo album she was flipping through. There were no more pictures, and she was back to being a lonely fifty-year-old woman.



Theresa sat slouched over on her worn blue carpet. She was jaded and weary, and for the first time in her long life she felt suffocated by the walls around her. She picked herself up off of the floor, knees popping painfully, and walked down the stairs and out her front door. Once in her car, she pulled out her long driveway onto the road and drove slowly, anxiously, to a nearby cemetery in a churchyard.

She navigated through the many burial plots with an eerie sort of ease, and stopped at a grave that showed every one of its forty-five years. She stood gazing at it for a moment, then seated herself at the end, gracefully arranging her skirts around her legs. She sat unmoving for quite some time, reading and rereading the crumbling headstone that marked his passing. “Kevin Kamaha: Our handsome beloved at rest.” There were no dates, but she knew the only one that mattered by heart. August 8, 2005. Kevin had killed himself, and she had never loved anyone again.

Flashes of the viewing tore through her mind at lightning speed to take her back, and back, and back. Theresa stood over him, staring in a sort of disbelieving fascination. He lay in a casket, positioned very much as he situated himself in sleep, on his back, with his arms perfectly at his sides. However, this Kevin didn’t look asleep, as many would say. He looked dead. There was no fluttering of the eyelids that masked his faded blue eyes. His chest did not rise and fall in the manner she had become accustomed to through sharing her bed with him many times over the few months that they had known each other. There was no small smile on his face, as if his dreams were always pleasant. No, this Kevin was most certainly gone forever.

Theresa could hear people whispering, his many acquaintances gossiping about his death, his life. Calling him selfish, calling him sinful. They didn’t understand. Even Theresa couldn’t understand. He had been so happy sometimes, so self-destructive others. And true to what the gossips were saying, she never would have expected it.

She listened to the whispers, about his mother, his father, him, even her, on occasion.

And finally, her mother’s voice. “It was a broken heart.”


August 11, 2055


Theresa Blair, sixty-five-year-old maiden lay in her own casket, at her own viewing, three days after her death. There was no tossing and turning, no feverish slumber. Her parents and her sister were the only ones present, and it was hard for them to grieve properly. They faced her death with a tired acceptance, and a deep sorrow that they did not feel more for her. Truthfully, they hadn’t known Theresa for fifty years, and even in the first fifteen years of her life, she was a hard person to notice when one was busy with other things. Her mother let a few tears escape for her youngest daughter, the one that got away, then the three of them turned their backs, got in their car, and drove away.