Some Could Read

Some could read.

Some could write.

Most could do neither.

Some could do both.

It was one of the many hidden secrets of the world. Every object has a story. Every interaction a person has with an object or another person, no matter how brief, adds to that story.

Most people, to varying degrees, could read the stories. For the slow readers, for the ones whose gift wasn't all that strong, they never saw a full story.

A man who was only slightly literate, might pick up an old baseball mitt from a garage sale, and know the exact smell of the field it had first played on, or be able to feel the impact of the ball as it hit the worn leather without ever having used it.

Most never acknowledged the gift, assuming it was something everyone experienced. Plenty of people knew things they shouldn't be able to know, but somehow just did anyway... right?

But, some were aware of it.

Some even read by choice.

And, a select few of those who read by choice, could even write, adding whatever they wanted to any object's story, even going as far as erasing it completely and adding a whole new tale.

These stories, they were the explanation behind cursed objects and haunted houses. Truly, there were no spirits of deceased people trapped in the houses that they once dwelt within, only their stories, etched and engraved in the carpets, ceilings, and walls.

To say that there were no human spirits haunting old houses, isn't to say that no spirits haunted them at all. There were plenty of things, cruel, evil things which craved the slowly fading murals of human tragedy and wickedness. But, to speak of those things, is to digress.

Adrian checked his watch, the watch that had belonged to both his father and grandfather.

He had one last look around the house that he had known as home for nearly a decade and said his final goodbye.

Luggage in hand, he walked to his car and loaded the last of what he'd decided to take. In the end, it hadn't been that much, only a few suitcases and a few sentimental keepsakes.

She could have the rest.

Chloe, whose real first name was Colette, arrived at home a few hours later. Work had been light and easy that day. She'd spent half her time playing one of those colorful matching games on her phone.

She was blonde, thin, nearly to the point of being frail. Chloe's hair was never a mess. Her makeup was always perfect. Chloe looked like she had been taken straight from a 1950s sitcom. She was a visual stereotype of the perfect housewife, a creature that had gone extinct sometime in the 90's.

But, it didn't end at her looks. Her demeanor was sweet and appreciative. She held her husband Adrian on a pedestal, her enamored gaze was something akin to minor worship.

She truly couldn't imagine how she'd go on without him. This thought, this feeling had compounded and grown over the last year.

For the first hour, she'd meandered around the house, beginning the first preparations for dinner. She performed the most necessary tasks first, setting the meat out to thaw, chopping the vegetables, drinking two glasses of wine.

The first clue that she noticed was a missing picture from the living room wall. It had been of Adrian and his father. The old man, who always smelled of pine and cigar smoke, passed on last spring. It was for the better.

She pushed it to the back of her mind, giving the excuse that perhaps the frame had broken and Adrian had placed the photo someplace safe, intending to get a replacement.

Chloe had read the photo before. Its story wasn't about her husband and his father's relationship. When she read the photos story, all she saw were dozens of moments, some happy, some sad, of her husband gazing at the frame, lost in memory.

Chloe thought of Adrian often when he wasn't around. He was special to her. He wasn't like her. He couldn't read, couldn't write the stories like she could, but still he had his own types of gifts.

There was a depth within him, a place that let him know the hidden things in the world. He was privy to some of the scents and flavors, textures of being that others could not, or would not experience.

Her second clue came when she went to draw her bath, wondering why her husband was late coming home. His toothbrush was gone, as well as his expensive electric razor she'd gotten him last Christmas.

Her third clue lay in her bedroom. She opened the closet to find all of his clothes missing.

Hands shaking, she dialed his number as she took the stairs two at a time.

The call went straight to voicemail.

It was then that she saw it. Lying on their dining room table, the only thing on the table was a single marigold.

Gingerly, she lifted the little golden flower and began to read. She saw their first date.

A woman had walked by them holding a large bouquet of roses and Adrian had caught her staring at them longingly. They had been such pretty flowers.

He'd bent down and picked a scraggly marigold from a crack in the sidewalk.

"Best I can do for now." He'd admitted with a sad smile as he handed her the little flower.

"I'll cherish it always." She'd replied in a bad British accent as she plucked the flower from his fingers.

She'd meant it, more than he'd guessed.

That same flower had been tucked away for years, secretly pressed in the pages of a heavy book stored in a box of her rarely used things.

She wasn't sure yet what she was going to do with it, but it would be special. Maybe she'd get it framed, or put it in a piece of art, glass. She'd been thinking of jewelry over the last year.

Once they'd gotten married she'd decided she would give it to him on their twentieth wedding anniversary. It didn't matter so much what she did with the marigold in the book.

The real gift was that he was so important to her, important enough for her to give him a gift twenty years in the making.

She'd decided upon their twentieth anniversary because her parents had only made it to nineteen, before the divorce.

People whispered that her father had been unfaithful, but in truth it had actually been her mother.

That young twenty two year old he started dating only two weeks after the separation? He hadn't really cared about her. She was just a distraction.

Divorce was something Chloe had grown up fearing.

She never wanted one, and always promised herself if she was to marry, it would be until death.

But how?

Why was this story, their first date written on the marigold? Who had done it? Certainly not Adrian, he couldn't even read.

She read further into the story and she saw their second date, and third. It was a catalogue of their most happy times together.

The first time they'd kissed, the moment she realized she more than just liked him, the moment she realized that he felt the same way about her, the first 'I love you', the first time they were intimate.

The story continued. Every memory was good, even the fights. Those fights, they were just love's harsher affirmations. They fought because they cared. The marigold understood that.

Then, the story took a turn. A year ago was when it happened. She gasped, as the flower showed her at her office, bent over her bosses desk as they, together made a fool of her husband and a mockery of her marriage.

Why had she done it?

Because her boss was handsome, powerful and masculine in a way that Adriane wasn't?

She couldn't say. Even looking back from an outside perspective, she couldn't say, and that frightened her most of all.

The story went on.

The marigold showed her husband finding a pair of her underwear that her shame riddled mind had tossed in the hamper without thinking, without thinking about how they were covered in the evidence of her betrayal.

Maybe she'd wanted to get caught.

He had read them.

Read them? But Adriane couldn't read…?

He'd confronted her, but only by tossing the underwear on the bed as she played those stupid matching games on her phone.

There was no denying it. He'd read it for himself. He'd seen what she'd done.

Without a word he left the bedroom, choosing to sleep on the couch that night.

In lieu of having to watch her life crumble, of having to face the consequences of what she'd done, Chloe snuck downstairs and read Adrian as he was sleeping.

She erased the parts, the memories in Adrian of her cheating. Terrified that he would somehow rediscover the truth, that he'd see it in something, in the bed, in the house maybe, she read through his story, and erased every memory he had of reading and writing.

Then, so she didn't have to live with the guilt of what she'd done, erased parts of her own story including the direct knowledge that Adrian could read.

Chloe gazed at the marigold, turning it slowly between her fingers, and continued to read.

Adriane had anticipated her treachery.

That watch of his, the one that had belonged to his father and his grandfather, the watch that was so important to him, he'd written his story upon it, as his father and his father's father had done.

He wrote a warning to himself, of what his wife might do.

He knew his wife too well. After all, he could read her like a book.

After Chloe erased part of her own story, it was only a matter of time before Adrian remembered his. One evening while fiddling with his watch, he managed to read it without knowing what he was doing.

So there it was.

She had left him twice betrayed but he'd managed to come out with the upper hand.

Something interesting happens to an object once it becomes a vassal for a story, a message for a particular person.

Chloe had reached the last chapter in the Marigold, there were few pages left.

Dear Chloe,

Since you will do anything to keep me, since there are no sacred grounds you will not trample, I've decided that you are too dangerous. Giving you an amicable separation isn't an option. In order to protect myself, my memories, I will simply disappear and you will not hear from me or see me, ever again.

But why the marigold I'm sure you're asking?

Why show you what you've chosen to forget?

Wouldn't it be easier, safer for me to not show you?

The answer is that you don't deserve to forget.

I hope you can't live with yourself Chloe.

Once an object has intent, had its story erased and rewritten, once it's sole purpose has been designated to tell a single story to a single person, it will remain in its pristine form if not forever, then for a long time.

If Chloe had never read the marigold, it would have stayed as it was, never drying out, never falling apart, for hundreds of years if not thousands.

But once read, it would cease to be beyond a memory.

The marigold fell to dust in Chloe's hand, the grey scale drifted between herself as nothing more than dust and ash.

Adrian was right. She couldn't live with herself. And she had promised herself since childhood, that if she would ever marry, it would be until her death.

So, she went into the kitchen and with a steak knife, cut open her wrists and forearms.

As she slowly drained, her blood wrote a new, darker story into the wood and walls of their house.