1st draft

Faith became a currency on those nights Misery picked Magic up for their dates. Sleep suspended for a later, those half-remembered dream that last six months and two continents.  That first time? A dark haired boy stumbled into a girl with grey-green eyes. The train had stopped unexpectedly. 

The girl from English Lit, he said. The ones that never paid any attention. He touched her cheek, she said nothing.

She blinked behind her glasses, not quite cat-eye.  She had always crushed hard on the engineering types, the earnest, sure way their hands moved, the calculation bubbles above their heads, waiting for them to tell her where she fit in the equations.

Decades have slipped past and yet the jolt of a train carriage makes a heart clench in memory. For a moment, she could still smell him on her skin, even though it was a Tuesday, three world's away.

There had been a distraction of an older soldier poet, the jazz musician, the villain pretending to be kind. That last one? The villain, trying to be kind, the kind who always looks better in white tie, knew how to smile for the camera but could never quite hold the door? That one became a theme.

The marking of time and a shadow love found another February and a different kind of ache. First, flowers and unexpected calls, later a sterile room, the rustle of a paper gown, driving home against the advice. Later, the Czech winter wind icy blades against a garden-sheared head

Now it marks different pains: skin still marbled from stretch marks from a blue-skinned fairy that would never breath on his own. The antiseptic bright of burn units, mingling with charred yet soupy flesh. 

Hospice and a father so gaunt, he has wizened himself before his time.

She used geography as a weapon

In Prague, she turned inward. In London, peeled back the skin to see what lived inside. In Tulsa and San Antonio, the harbinger of unexpected life she didn't know would be a new salvation.  

Now, she stays closer to home, most days. A different kind of ordinance map, different view of the sea. Savouring the ability to separate out lonely from alone, she decides not re-read the Brontë sisters just yet. Those great romances? They are not how-tos. They are warnings lights. Even Mr Rochester could see, in that final chapter. In retrospect, she has a sneaking suspicion he's still only sorry about the whole 'wife in the attic' thing because he got found out.