Scrabble

It started exactly four months after Lori died. He’d drift into sleep, and at 2 a.m., the exact time the nurse pulled the sheet over her face, the words would come. They would drift around on the inside of his skull, random fragments relating to the day gone by. Angry words, written in dark red streamed in night after night without fail.

After a couple of weeks he figured out that he could will the words to move. He’d move one word to the center of the blackness that enclosed him, and then another, but as soon as he moved a third into place, the other two would drift away in a slow explosion, rotating and getting lost amongst the other ones. He’d wake up almost screaming in frustration, night after night. One Sunday afternoon, smoking on the balcony of his little flat, he noticed a commotion outside the corner shop below. A boy had stolen a loaf of bread, and the shop owner was shaking him by the arm, demanding payment and threatening to call the police. He reached into his pocket, grabbed a few coins and let them drop by the grubby owner’s feet, two storeys below. The man looked up at him, instructed the boy to pick up the coins and hand them to him, and let the boy go.

That night a new word entered the jumble in his head, and immediately caught his attention. Pale blue in colour, it floated gracefully through his field of vision:

“Hope.”

Knowing he’d found a key, a clue, he slowly changed his thoughts and actions. Day by day there were more pale blue words, until finally, there was hardly a red one in sight. On the anniversary of Lori’s death, walking home from work on a cold winter’s evening, he noticed and old man shivering in his sleep in front of a bakery. Without thinking, he covered the old man with his coat and hurried home. Finding his block in the midst of yet another power outage, he lit a few candles, had some cold canned soup and nodded off in his armchair, an old book open on his lap.

The blue words came, and as usual he pinned one… pinned two… and started looking for a third. To his great surprise, the first two didn’t immediately start drifting away as he searched for the third, and he felt a tingle of promise in his spine.

Moving his body in his unconscious excitement, the book slipped off his lap and knocked over the candle by his side. The curtains caught fire, followed by the carpet and ceiling. As the carbon monoxide filled his lungs and slowed his heartbeat, he finally formed a sentence:

“You are home”

Waking up with a start he shook the sleeping form next to him: “Lori! Honey wake up! I solved it, it makes sense!” She shifted a little and yawned “Okay baby… tell me all about it over breakfast, the kids will be up soon…” He put an arm around her, and smiled at the silvery dawn.