Excerpt of A Universe Akilter

“But you don’t love me.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you loved me, you ought to have greeted me with ‘Miss Soli what a wonderful—take note of that word, wonderful—evening it is’ instead of a simple ‘hello.’ One can greet any acquaintance with a mere ‘hello.’ It is almost as bad as ignoring one altogether.”

“I don’t think that can be the case,” I tried to protest, but unfortunately the lady had already decided on her feelings and nothing would change them.

“I think you want me dead,” she proclaimed, in a loud, quavering voice; and all around her the ballpoint-pen eyes of her associates elongated toward us in mawkish interest. Behind feathers and fans, I could hear the trumpet-loud belch of gossip approaching. With every train-whistle shriek of the lady’s tirade—here is something like it, as far as I can recall:

Degenerate! Oh! Despicable! And not even washed your shoes! What reason did you have for leaving me that evening last June, when we were at the train station, waiting for the mail? Did the mail even arrive? No! Not a bit! I have found certain letters in your own hand—oh yes, I’ve found them. Do you want to see?

Not letting a moment of my protest daunt her, she procured them: from out of her long furred parasol; reams and reams of the stuff all in brown ink, sludge-brown and beetled, as lame as an orange half-digested. “Explain. This.”

The utter silence was as curious and uncertain as a spider’s laugh, and quite as tenacious.

“I cannot,” I said, seeing the evidence before me. I stammered. “I cannot.”

“You see, you have treated me wrongfully. Take the damn things. Take them all!” She pushed them into my hands. Piled and dripping with the smell of overseas ash and heavy. They fell out of my paralyzed fingers, tracing circles around my shoes, which had been muddied from the rain last evening. On the way back from the opera, Miss Soli had been in such fine spirits—it had been a flash of something brilliant in her that captivated me; and I can recall wondering if the hard times between us were over at last.

Still the papers were a complete mystery to me, for I had not written them. Yet it was without a doubt in my own hand, with my own name at the bottom, signing, dear, my love, little darling— to a lover I had never had!

The laughter began roiling. On every side, roiling, and the righteous fury of lady Soli made her face as red as a radiator painted red.

“Don’t! Not one word!” She turned to her fellows. “He says not one word in his defense! Have you ever seen such a reprobate? I feel wounded, utterly wounded—” her great black lashes clumped together as she blinked; her face shimmered with fat, blobby tears. They dotted the papers at my feet. They seemed to have enough force that I was not surprised when I gathered up the entire handful and edged out the door, because the salt of her tears repelled my hydrophobic spirit. But it was raining outside. The porch, a midden of a thing, stopped nothing. From the brim of my hat, the rainwater laughed at me, slipping over the words in my hand. I stuck everything in the pockets of my greatcoat until they were bulging open and I felt ill—sick and ill! The back of my throat was sour and scratched with sweetness. I walked out to catch a cab, and the mud slopped over my shoes. The laces were caked in mud. The sky was caked in a grime of smog and rain, stuck and cracked to the earth. By the time I had managed to pay the requisite amount, I was shivering, and I did not stop even as the heating turned up and great gusts of dry air blew into my eyes.

ii.

When one has just had a most public and humiliating rupture between one’s mistress and oneself—for reasons of a person of no existence—there is really nothing for it but to become familiarized with the crime. So having taken my things from our shared rooms to a hotel on the other part of town, I set all the letters upon the bed and tabletops and half-draped over the frowning face of the mini-fridge, and as they dried, timorously, I took off my coat…

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Sara Barkat is also the illustrator of two gothic tales which she has adapted, unabridged, as graphic novels…

The Yellow Wall-Paper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Colour out of Space, by H.P. Lovecraft