She’d developed a stubborn habit of forgetting at least one of those three vital accessories which a person ought never leave the house without – her phone, her purse, her keys. She had always been absent-minded, but this went beyond absent-mindedness: it was too regular to be absent-mindedness. It was as though she scheduled these errors into her routine for the sake of reminding herself that such accidents were, in the end, unavoidable. The main problem with this idea was that Cecilia was incapable of scheduling anything. Even as she swept her arm in an exaggerated arc (brushing the low-hanging light fixture in the front hall with the tips of her fingers as she did so), saying “wish me luck, Buddy” and blowing him an extravagant kiss, Arthur wasn’t certain that she wouldn’t make an equally flamboyant return in the next five minutes. He might have asked her if she had everything she needed, but to that she would just respond in the affirmative without bothering to check. That’s what she always did.
As Cecilia turned and shouldered the screen door open, Arthur took note of both the purse and the keys – the former choking her left wrist with its worn leather strap, the latter bunched on a silver ring which hung in the crook of the same hand’s clawed index finger. As for the phone, he would assume that it floated somewhere in the aforementioned purse swinging by Cecilia’s side, among the never-opened miniature first aid kits, the scratch
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Rohan Pinto is a consultant based in Brampton. He writes in his spare time and this is his first published story.