And Then She Left

Dale Scherfling

I named her Mary Jones.

She had shoulder-length dark hair. Nothing spectacular about the face. She wasn’t the kind of woman who stopped a room. She was the kind who stayed in it — quietly, steadily — until one day you realized she had become the room.

I don’t know if she’s real. But the hurt is.

She came to me in a dream. In the dream we were in a kitchen that wasn’t mine, yellow walls, a window with bad light coming through it. She was already at the door. I understood — the way you understand things in dreams, in the chest, not the mind — that we had been something, and that the something was over, and that I had done it. I reached for her and she was already outside. The door stayed open. Cold came in off a parking lot.

I woke at 4 a.m. with my hand out.

The dream didn’t fade. I’d be driving, and there she’d be again — the dark hair, the ordinary face, the cold from that parking lot.

Months ago, there had been someone. I was almost certain of it. The way early love tilts the floor slightly, everything sliding toward one corner of the room. And then it stopped, and I had let it stop. Afterward, I was careful not to look at it directly, the way you don’t look at something you’ve done.

I went looking through the last year for evidence. A name. A place. Anything.

Nothing came.

Only her in the doorway. Only the light through that window, the color of old newspaper, the color of mornings that have already been used up.

Maybe that’s what she is. Not a woman. Not even a memory. Just a shape. The exact dimensions of a thing I once had in my hands.

She still comes back. In dreams. In the half-second before sleep when something loosens.

Mary Jones. Shoulder-length dark hair.

I must have found her once.
I must have been the one who left.