The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

My girlfriend died. She was in a car accident. My mother woke me up the next morning to tell me. She was a mess and I found myself comforting her instead of processing what she had just told me. After she left it sunk in. I cried for hours. I started crying because my girl was gone. I kept crying because our last words had been hard ones. A fight over the phone. The funeral was awful. I only glanced at her body. Too much make up. It made me ill. Later that night I found myself hugging my pillow, unable to sleep. I fumbled for my phone in the dark. I read our last text conversation. Then I wrote her a new message: Me: I'm so sorry, Lizz. I'll love you forever. I hit send and eventually drifted off to sleep. I woke up to my phone buzzing. I looked at the time. 1:49 am. It was a message from her phone. Lizz: Forever? smile emoticon Who has her phone? I wondered. I was instantly angry. Me: Who is this? Lizz: It's me, Lizz. I was so angry tears started welling up in my e...

It’s been about two months since it happened, since I came home from work on a rainy night, flowers and chocolate in hand. This isn’t going to be easy to say, but if I’m going to tell the story, I have to tell all of it. I had had an affair. I didn’t mean to, really I didn’t. It just sort of… happened. I was having dinner with a coworker, s peaking of a new contract about to be signed, when the conversation moved to her apartment. I felt terrible afterwards, I wanted to take it back, but I knew I couldn’t. My girlfriend could be… overly dramatic. That’s why I knew it would only make the situation worse to try and hide it and risk her finding out herself. So there I was, standing outside our apartment, flowers and chocolate in hand, preparing to beg for forgiveness. I raised a shaking hand and knocked. I waited a few moments before knocking again. I could hear the large grandfather clock ticking through the door, maybe she wasn’t home? I set down the flowers and began ...

It’s Halloween, Mama, so please don’t be mad. You found me, quite safe, so instead, let’s be glad. And now that we’re home and I’m warm in my fleece, May I have my candy, if only a piece? You brought me back early from tricks and from treats, Don’t punish me more by forbidding me sweets. “Why did I stray off as we went down the lane?” That Clickety Man called, “Let’s play by the train.” What “Clickety Man?” Oh, the one by the tracks, Where clickety wheels make their clickety-clacks. And the clickety bones that poke through his pants, Play clickety beats, for his clickety dance. The October wind blows his skin off in flakes, While whistling a tune through the holes that it makes. But the skeleton grin that lies on his face, Is not truly happy, he feels out of place. First, struck by an engine that came in a rush, His unburied body decayed in the brush. And that means old Clickety’s without a bed, No box, and no hole, and no stone overhead. So I said, “Come with me, nobody will mind.” Bu...

“I’ll give you a moment,” Tom said, ever the respectful brother. “Please stay,” Susan asked. “If you leave me here I might jump in with him.” She had always been dramatic, but there was definite sincerity in her voice now. “He’d love the absurdity of that. If it wasn’t his funeral he’d probably double-dog-dare you to do it.” A laugh caught halfway in Susan’s throat, escaped a moment later as a sob. “He was so funny, so full of life, so determined. Every day he’d tell me, ‘Susan, if all those supermodels beating down our door can’t take me away from you, how does cancer stand a chance?’” “Supermodels?” Tom’s train of thought often struggled to build up steam. “Oh,” he muttered eventually, “he was joking.” “I miss him so much. I hope he knows that.” Susan traced his cheek with her fingertips, bent and placed a trembling kiss on his unmoving lips. She pulled back slowly, shuddering with grief and leaving many tears in her wake. “It’s hard, seeing him like this,” she s...

Every once in a while, something very interesting will come into my mom’s library. We live in a small town, so people often go to the library for answers, knowing that my mother has an extensive background in researching things like history and genealogy. Those are the people we get most often, act ually: people with questions about their own family history. Oftentimes they’ll come in with partial records and ask my mother to fill in the gaps. She’s always more than happy to do it. Not only is she good at it, but it also serves as an acceptable reprieve from the relative boredom of small-town life. I enjoy helping her out, too, from time to time, and hearing about the cases she works on. Some of them are interesting and tell stories you wouldn’t believe – murders, secret graves, sordid suicides, and a million other gritty pieces of humanity that have been swept under the rug. Since I was a child, this has fascinated me. But I wish that my mother hadn’t taken on this la...