Fiction. 5 minutes to read.
She splashed water on the page to see through it. She liked knowing the future, to make life temporarily transparent. Fragments of sentences. The suffix of a word. Little glimpses of what came next without having to turn the page.
~
The book was pocket sized and bound in leather. Titled with her name, in gold. It cost more than a house, not her house, because she didn’t have one. The Publisher gave her a payment plan with 12% interest. Two thousand dollars a page. Pretty good deal. She signed. Every day prior was redacted. Nostalgia costs extra.
She read that she’d fall in love. His name is Dio. She spent ten thousand dollars over ten months working doubles to read where they met. At the restaurant where she worked. Go figure. He’d sit in a booth. She’d smile, clearing his plate. “Anything else I can get you?”
He’d ask for dessert recommendations. ”Not here,” he’d say. “Somewhere else.”
She’d blush and tell him about a pastry shop not far away, along the waterfront.
“Join me,” he’d say.
“Okay,” she’d say.
~
There was safety in knowing what came next, but also dullness. She wanted to stick around because she fell in love, not because she knew they’d stay together, to feel the danger of every turn. Also, she’s broke. Two thousand dollars a page is a lot. She put her Life Book aside and didn’t open it for a while.
Dio took her on dates twice a week. Dinners, movies, museums, walks. Everything was more exciting without reading her Life Book first. Dio paid for everything. They had sex after seeing a movie or a piece of art stuck on a wall like a crucifix. He was gentle and patient, and she always came first. Sometimes at his place, sometimes at hers. When he stayed over, they’d walk to the park and talk about life from a bench under a tree. That was their spot. When he left, she fluttered through the crisp white pages chronicling their dates and felt content.
There were so many pages left to read in her Life Book, locked behind an impregnable paywall that needed penetration from a credit card, but she didn’t care. She was living life, not reading it. She found her work days went faster when she didn’t know what came next. Until Dio stopped texting her, stopped seeing her.
Walking through the rain from the subway, she felt miserable. Her Life Book was under the bed, where she left it months ago. She checked her messages for Dio, like she did every day. But nothing. She checked her bank account, which made her feel worse. If there was any day to send something to say he was safe, that he loved her and wasn’t cheating on her, it was today. She fell on the bedroom floor and cried. She reached for her Life Book and carried the whole damn thing to the sink. She wet the current page. Bits of paragraph appeared, layered, and backwards.
She deciphered: “Dio disappears in a black van, deported. The Good Old Boys pick him up on the corner of…” She screamed. The page ended without saying where. She drenched the entire page, searching for a location that wasn’t there. Sheets of rain drummed on the window. She couldn’t pay for a new page, not yet. Maybe he wasn’t destined for her. Thunder rumbled outside. Lightning opened a vein; suddenly, she felt hot, like she needed air. She took her Life Book outside.
Cars splashed by. Metal-headed streetlights wept yellow light on the soaked city. She peered through the storm, eyes open, defying its rage. Her Life Book felt heavy. She let it fall in a puddle. Its title, her golden name, tarnished in the rain like fool’s gold. Black ink bled on the street. She followed it down the sidewalk. Led by the liquified words of her life, she came to their spot: the park bench beneath the tree. She sat to feel his presence beside her again. Her foot touched something stiff beneath the bench, not rock or soil, something manufactured. She bent and saw a Life Book. Dio’s Life Book. It was completely paid for, every page available to read. The bench had sheltered it from the storm.
She found his current page. She did not look ahead. Her chest made a canopy over his Life Book, cradled in her lap. She had to know. She read her name in the first line: “Dio is taken on his way to see (her). He struggles with the Good Old Boys, but loses. He throws his Life Book under a park bench; they take him to Juárez.”
Dio knew all this would happen. He knew he’d shed blood, break bones, lose his retirement paying for the book. He knew he’d wait every day from sunrise to sunset at the Lady of Guadalupe Cathedral in Juárez until she found his Life Book under their favorite park bench. She’d take a red-eye that night to Juárez and find him standing on the cathedral steps in the young light of a new day, his shoes worn from standing on them, his clothes dirty from odd jobs, and his lips chapped from dehydration. She’d see him; he’d see her, and they would know, for love, it was worth it.
*as published by Flash Fiction Magazine, summer 2023
Austin Treat 
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