It was a strange plaster on his finger
 
It was a strange plaster on his finger. A tangle of rough, dangling white threads, snagged into play by blunt scissors. The pink of the strip, false and fleshy toned but ever so different to flesh. Curling now. Giving over into white corners, grey with fluff.
 
“I had an accident with the glass”.
 
He was seated before her. Waiting for her. He had been waiting for her for days. And finally that night the glass in him had broken. The glass in his hand had become him. Charging it to the floor he dashed his hand into the pieces. But as nobody else was there to comfort him. He had tried to comfort himself. And the hot tears of lonely comfort were his.
 
Twelve hours later there she stood, like a delicate and beautiful little owl, looking at the dark purple mark on the duvet, where he had painted a trail for her eyes. The illustrator at work on his masterpiece of misery. He knew how to lead her to him. That she would touch his hand. Hold it. He would feel her press the cut. Feel him wincing. Desperate for her fingers to feel his. To find his pain. Read it in his face as she burrowed deep beneath the plaster. His first dressing. Limp. Tattered scarecrow. Would breathe neglect and hasten her to him. Treading through the glass she made a shocking face and his eyes filled wide into downtrodden black.
 
In those first few hours, there again was the music he liked. He told her that it was the choice of American college students but that he didn't mind that. He liked it anyway. This music lived the days and nights of his pain. Danced his pain. And the even skip of it trilled away in the background like a blind songbird oblivious to his weakening. Even the shattering glass had only silenced that trilling for a moment. The notes lay in the pieces of glass on the floor with the dawn and the daylight as he held his gaze fast to the door through which she was going to walk. Through which she did walk. Walk into the ten minutes after which he was going to tell her that he had smashed the glass on purpose.

 
* Helen Pletts is a regular IS&T contributor. She was born in the UK but now lives in Prague in the Czech Republic, where she teaches creative writing.