So I don't post a lot of my stuff on YWS, but I feel like there's something a little off about this that I can't place, so I want to see if any of you awesome people have opinions. Is it the format? Something else? Also, any ideas for a better title? Tear it up.
They met at a vegetable market. She wore all red, sharply contrasting against the backdrop of cauliflowers. And when she smiled at him over the asparagus, Will knew she was the one for him.
When he gave her the wedding ring, simple with a pinprick diamond, she said she’d keep it forever.
“It’ll be the most important thing I’ll ever own,” Candace said. “Promise.”
*
The newspapers spiraled up the stairs, years and years of history. They pressed against the wall and the railing and the ceiling, yellowed bits flaking away and falling to the floor. In the center of the staircase was a narrow passage, barely single-file, and this was how you reached the second floor.
*
It started with the newspapers. The day after their wedding, Candace had plucked the paper out of Will’s hands, folded it, smoothed down the creases.
“Let’s keep this,” she had said, smiling. “So we can remember today, and everything that was happening.”
And the next day: “We’ll keep all the newspapers. We’re never going to forget these days, Will, even when we’re old and gray.”
Will laughed. They were only twenty, and he couldn’t imagine ever growing old.
*
The first room on the second floor could have been a nursery. But instead, it was Candace’s mirror room. Every inch of white wall space was covered in mirrors: large, small, simple, ornate, clear, tarnished.They leaned against the bottom of the walls and in corners, a few covered the floor. Look into one on the right, and you saw the hundreds of mirrors on the left. Reflections bounced back and forth between walls, with no escape.
No escape.
*
Candace liked yard sales. Garage sales, estate sales, auctions. Every weekend, she begged Will to drive to them with her.
“Think,” she said to him as she ran her hands along porcelain plates and glass figurines. “All these things have stories, and no one knows them. Isn’t it sad, to think of one’s things all cast off, their stories- your stories- forgotten?” She smiled, but her eyes were distant and fearful.
“Yeah,” Will said, though he didn’t quite understand what Candace meant. “Sure.” Sometimes he wondered how her brain worked.
*
And next to the mirror room was the bedroom, which housed Candace’s jewelry and her knick-knacks. Her little bright, bejeweled boxes, her dolls, her dishes and glasses that were “too nice for the kitchen”.
In the night, Will looked around, and felt as if all of the things were ever getting closer, coming to swallow him up. He would look over at Candace, and she would have one of her necklaces clutched to her chest.
*
He knew something was wrong the day she didn’t ask him to drive her to a sale. He was afraid that he’d offended her when he told her their storage room had too much stuff in it, and the papers in the corner of the living room were piling a bit too high. It was true, but he didn’t want her to be angry.
“Don’t you want to go out, hon?”
“No,” Candace turned away from the window where she stood, looking out. “There are so many people out there who can destroy you. Who can take away your memories, your thoughts and hopes and dreams.” Her voice dropped. “Your life.”
“You’re afraid someone’s going to kill you? Honey, it’s a yard sale. You’ll be safe.”
“You can die anywhere.” She shook her head at Will’s naiveté. “A bus could run you down, or, or-” And suddenly, she was sobbing, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Oh, Will, I don’t want to die.”
He sighed, and enfolded her in his arms. “Shh, Candy, it’s alright. It’s alright.”
*
The last room on the second floor housed paintings. It had been late in her collecting career when she started to ask for pictures, but she’d managed to amass quite a few. There were many of sunsets, going out in a blaze of glory, many of fields and forests. A few cities, but to Candace those had a edge of danger.
There were none set inside. Once, Will had brought home a beautiful picture of a ballroom. Lords and ladies in bright candy colors twirling around a golden dance hall. He was rather fond of it, and proud of himself for finding it.
Candace had looked it over, her lip curling with distaste. “Burn it,” she said. “Just burn it.”
And so the room simply held pictures of the great outdoors.
*
Though Candace didn’t go outside anymore.
After the crying incident, she never left the house, not even to get the mail. Will got the groceries and bought clothes for both of them.
And every day, Candace would waltz downstairs and tell Will what she wanted him to find to add to her collection.
“Look, right here in this newspaper ad. ‘Two gold candlesticks.’ I want you to get those for me, ‘kay?”
“Alright, I’ll just take the page, and I’ll check it out on the way back from work.”
“No!” She pulled the paper out from under his hand. “This has to go with the rest of today’s paper, in the stack!”
The stack was what she affectionately called the piles of newspapers that filled the corner in front of the stairs, and had started to make it’s way up onto the steps.
“About that... I think we should throw out some of those papers. They take up an awful lot of space.”
Candace gasped. “Will! Those mean a lot to me! Those are our memories, those all are the days we’ve been married.”
She wiped away tears with the back of her hand.
“Hey, don’t get upset, I didn’t mean-” Will started to say. But she wouldn’t be appeased.
“Those mean so, so much to me and you want to take them away from me. You want to take away what makes me happy.”
She sniffed and fixed him with an accusing glare. He felt a pang of guilt.
“That’s not true, Candy” he said. “You know I want you to be happy. I love you.”
He kissed her softly, and she gave a watery smile. With a sigh, Will grabbed his briefcase and headed to work.
*
The attic had books.
Full shelves covered the walls, and more volumes were stacked across the floor. Old or new, classics or not, it didn’t matter. Candace liked the smell of Perma-bound covers and the smooth feel of well thumbed pages, though she rarely read.
“Imagine all the people who’ve lounged with theses books on sunny afternoons, or curled up with them when it rained!” Candace would say.
When she did read, it was obsessively. She would spend days on end in the attic, ravenously devouring a novel. She didn’t eat or wash or even sleep unless Will reminded her. Sometimes he would wake up and she’d be up there again. He’d grit his teeth and swear beneath his breath, because he couldn’t trust her to take care of herself.
Thankfully, once she was done with a book, she wouldn’t pick another one up for months or even years.
*
Will kept the kitchen and dining room clean. While the rest of the rooms, the ones on the second floor and the living room, were overrun with Candace’s things, he made sure that none of that infiltrated where he prepared and ate his meals.
Candace, however, had taken to eating in her room, looking over all her trinkets. Will ate alone in the silent, cold dining room, picking at his food and taking long swigs from a brandy bottle.
*
Will’s things were in the basement. There was no room for them in the rest of the house, so he kept his clothes and shoes and law books in the basement. Some days he slept down there.
*
It happened the day Candace announced they could no longer use the stove.
“It’s dangerous,” she said cheerily. “There could be, you know, a gas explosion or something. So from now on, it’s takeout. Okay, Will? Okay?”
He stood there, motionless, briefcase hanging from his hand.
“No.”
“What?” Candace half laughed, like she was sure she’d heard wrong.
“No. No, this is insane. We’re going to keep using the stove.”
“Do you want to kill us, Will! Or do you just want to kill me. You hate me, that’s it. You’d be happier if I was dead!”
And he snapped. All the anger he’d never known he had came rushing out.
“Shut up! You’re so ridiculous! I do hate you, because you’ve turned this place into a hell! Look! Look around you, Candace. There’s hardly room to move! I am sick, Candy, of being buried alive under all your things!”
“F-f-fine! If you hate it so much, leave.” She pointed one stubby, shaking finger at the door. “There’s the exit, you can go.”
And he did.
*
Off of the bedroom, there was a closet. For the last twenty years of their marriage, Candace had been keeping her fingernail clippings in little plastic bags, and putting them in there.
She did it on the first of every month, and then labeled the bag with the month and year. She had them all arranged in chronological order.
“That’s disgusting, Candy.” Will had told her many times.
“More disgusting than them lying around the house?” she always answered. “Thought so. It’s just a little thing, Will. Let me be myself.”
She used to do it with her hair, but she had stopped trimming that years and years ago. Now it was thin, damaged, straggly; it reached past her waist.
She was over fifty, and darts of gray shot through the dark curtain.
*
Will stayed away for weeks and weeks, debating what to do. He knew he’d have to talk to Candace sometime, apologize to her.
He loved her, or had loved her, in the days when she had been a free spirit, a breath of fresh air. But now... did he? He felt like he barely knew her, as though the real her had died a long time ago.
It was a sweltering, sticky day in August when he left his hotel room to go talk to her.
He stood nervously in front of the house for a long time, debating. What would she say? What would he say?
The door creaked as he opened it, and foul smell filled his nostrils, making his eyes water.
“Candy?”
No answer. He stepped into the house and looked around.
Had she left while he was gone?
And then he saw her. She was laying on the stairs, pressed between the towers of newspapers.
Slowly, he walked to her.
Flies buzzed around her, one crawled across her glassy eyeball. Will waved a hand to chase it away.
He bundled Candace’s body closer to him. A tear ran down his nose and splattered on a rogue newspaper.
He picked it up and saw that it was the first one, the one that started it all. Candy had been so vibrant that day.
He pulled her limp body closer, and breathed a sigh of relief.
It was over.
