Stray

It had been raining the day she died.

It was a romantic sort of death, a gradual fading away. A pallor that settled over her skin, a loss of interest in what was around her, a loss of her mind.

By the end she was an animated statue of cold pearly grey. And then she died.

It had been raining on the day of her interment.

Her parents had chosen the word, put it on the top of the notice that was posted on the Parish churches noticeboard, and the obituary that was placed in the village newspaper and the front of the little booklets with the order of service:



They’d asked him to speak, too.

He’d declined.

It had been raining the day he left.

The perpetual rain, the pain of the last half a year of watching the girl he loved die had shown on the car he drove.

It was not a bad car, nor was it a particularly old one.

But he had forgotten it as he took her out for walks, trying to get her to see the beauty of the village that she had once shown him.

Trying to get her to admire the living green that crawled over the grey stone that made up almost every building in their little village.

She wouldn’t, couldn’t.

His car had been left to sink into the soggy, mossy ground; the paint to chip; the body to rust around the edges, becoming a sunset orange that she once would have loved.

He’d gone to the wake, for the briefest time, to say goodbye to all the people she had known.

They were people who had never liked him. Who had mistrusted, despised and shunned him, but they appreciated that he had loved her as just as keenly as and more desperately than they had done, and so they let their bad feelings and ill will get buried when Jessica was, and they said goodbye to him with real warmth and a desire to see him again.

He had left in his sunset car that night.

He had driven clear through the dark and through the rain, driven till he was on the other side of both.

Daybreak brought a sunrise that begged to be committed to a canvas.

It was one of the many thousands of things she would once have loved.

It was a Sunday.

He found a church.

It was a Catholic church, with a noticeboard advertising the times of Mass.

He parked his car under the board and went in, two full hours before Mass started.

It was beautiful inside. An opulent and decadent gift of adoration to the Lord Jesus they all loved.

He had only been inside one church before; the stone and moss church of Jessica’s hometown, and that only to please her. Only because she was by his side.

He had never been a Godly man, but he had admired God when he had seen Him in inside of Jessica. He loved the capacity for love God gave her, the boundless joy, the constant wonder at the beauty of the green grey and town she had known all her life.

He had not believed it when she had said God had given those qualities her. He had scoffed.

He believed it now.

He stayed for all four masses.

He sat at the front, with his head down, listening to everything that passed with a heavy sort of emptiness in his heart.

He left at sundown, carried on driving east.