Word Count: 362
One midsummer’s evening she left him to go live in a well. An old one, deep and dark with fieldstone walls that caught the sunlight at noon. The walls sparkled like sequins for fifteen minutes then faded back to rough granitey gray.
Each morning she’d wake to the soft first beams of the day and stirred to reach up to the light. Grab a fistful, gather it tight to her breast, hold onto this small portion she’d claimed as her own. And each lonely black night she would open her hand to find it had all slipped away.
He–no one–understood that she only could handle a little of life. That what she could grasp in her hand was more than enough. For the days were too full of brightness that blinded and the nights too filled with its loss.
He would call out her name, loud when he wandered nearby. Soft as the twilight as he circled farther away. Love wormed inside to cry out to him but fear fought her own impulse and held her hands over her mouth. Sometime in the cool evenings of early September he stopped searching.
She noticed the sun no longer swept directly over the well. She missed the silvery glints caught on the walls. She began to feel lonely, missed the sound of his voice, missed even the hum of the days going by. And cold, she began to feel cold and had not thought to bring with her a blanket.
One late September afternoon she stood up tall as she could on tiptoe to not miss the sound of his car up the drive. She called out to him, surprised at the strength of her voice swirling up towards the mouth of the well, growing in size, spilling out into the waning day in a sweet song.
He appeared within seconds, a stunned look on his face. He called her name softly. She smiled and reached up her hands. He disappeared for a moment. She imagined him finding a rope. Then the last of the day curved into a crescent, a sliver, and gone, as he slid the well cover in place.
