Excerpt from The Things She'll Be Leaving Behind.
Copyright Vanessa Farnsworth, 2018.

Ted didn’t leave Sandy in the usual way. There were no slamming doors or screeching tires. Voices were not raised. Promises were not broken; at least not of the sort that could ever be spoken. No, he simply strolled to the roof of their apartment building, beer in hand, and stepped over the edge without a thought as to what would happen next.

And what happened next is barely worth recording. The Earth didn’t shatter nor time stand still. Pigeons exploded then calmed, more interested in a stale sandwich lying abandoned in the gutter than in the thunderous arrival of human debris. Were it not for the sound of breaking glass, it’d be as if nothing had happened.

Maybe nothing had.

Some witnesses had seen a sack of clothes tumbling from the roof, others a mannequin. No one had seen a falling man despite one lying crushed at their feet. It just didn’t seem real, they said, and Sandy would have to agree although she herself had not been one of the witnesses. She’d been sitting in the living room, beer in hand, waiting for Ted to return from the hall with some ice. She hadn’t heard the thud, or the commotion below, and had barely registered the sirens when they tore through the late afternoon haze. But she’d heard the sound of breaking glass and had turned her head towards it as she drifted off.

Sandy wasn’t a smart woman. She didn’t own stock and couldn’t solve a crossword puzzle even when the answers were printed upside-down at its base. And although her family tended to agree that she’d never be a contestant on Jeopardy, Sandy knew a thing or two about suicide and the main thing she knew was that it wasn’t sudden. There were no flipping switches or shorts in the circuitry. It took time for a life to extinguish itself and it took more introspection than most people could muster.

This is how Sandy knows she will never die by her own hand.

Her father was a suicide although that’s not how it read on his death certificate. He hadn’t driven his car into a river or surprised a train. There were no razor blades or pill bottles littering the site of his demise. There was just his body with a shattered heart and her mother with a bitter one.

The heart attack had surprised no one.

Sandy’s father had prophesied it from the day of her birth – before, if her mother was to be believed – having conjured it from the dust of his own father’s grave and nurtured it with every thought, every fear, every dark desire, until finally, as the clock ticked down on his sixtieth year, his wish had been granted.

Sandy hadn’t cried then, although now, as she thinks of Ted, she does. She’d thought at the time that it was strange for him to leave the apartment in response to her request for ice. But she was on her third bottle by then so that thought, like so many others, proved ephemeral.

Then she had heard the sound of breaking glass.

It had come from the kitchen where a tumbler she’d haphazardly set on the counter had toppled and rolled, crashing to the floor while she hovered on the misty cusp of sleep. She was busy sweeping up the fragments an hour later when the police arrived and told her about Ted and the pigeons and the dumbfounded witnesses.

This is how the sound of breaking glass came to be fused with Ted’s death. And not only that. It’s also how Sandy came to be living in a bungalow, on the mercifully flat prairies, hurling insults at pigeons, and informing anyone who’d listen about the dangers of requesting ice for their beer. Not everyone listened. Even Sandy picked up on that. But she felt that it was her duty to continue to try.

For the past.

For Ted.

For the promises that were made but never spoken.