Eleanor
Authors: Jason Gurley
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Eleanor
Copyright © 2014 Jason Gurley
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for reasonable quotations for the purpose of reviews, without the author’s written permission.
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ALSO BY JASON GURLEY
Novels
The Travelers
(forthcoming)
Collections & Short Stories
Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything
The Book of Matthew (The End of Greatfall)
Anthology Appearances
Synchronic: Thirteen Tales of Time Travel
Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Stories
(forthcoming)
The Robot Chronicles
(forthcoming)
ACCLAIM FOR JASON GURLEY AND
ELEANOR
“Jason Gurley will be a household name one day.”
–
Hugh Howey,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Wool
“Haunting… if you liked
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
, you’ll love
Eleanor.
”
– Peter Cawdron, author of
Feedback
and
Xenophobia
“Gurley’s masterful prose is reminiscent of Neil Gaiman… enchanting, haunting and powerful.”
– Ernie Lindsey,
USA Today
bestselling author of
Sara’s Game
“Ambitious, challenging… as original as
A Wrinkle in Time.
Jason Gurley creates worlds I deeply want to explore.”
– Michael Bunker, author of
Wick
and
Pennsylvania
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– Ted Kosmatka, Nebula Award-nominated author of
Prophet of Bones
“An amazing talent… brings the human side to science fiction.”
– Matthew Mather, bestselling author of
The Atopia Chronicles
“Proof that science fiction can be as emotionally evocative as the finest literary writing.”
– William Hertling, author of
Avogadro Corp.
“Gurley’s works have the precision of memoir, finding that delicate balance between the fantastic and the poignant.”
– Samuel Peralta, award-winning author of
How More Beautiful You Are
“Jason Gurley is a manipulative bastard. He grabs you at the beginning of the story and doesn’t let you go until you’ve experienced exactly what he wants you to. Let him.”
– MeiLin Miranda, author of
An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom
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– Erik Wecks, author of
Aetna Adrift
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C
ONTENTS
She sits in the breakfast nook and watches the rain. It falls with purpose, as if it has a consciousness, as if it intends to eradicate the earth, layer by layer. The front lawn is hard to make out in the downpour, but Eleanor can already see that the top layer of soil has been churned into mud. Her flowers bend sideways, petals yanked off by the storm. By afternoon only the thorny rose stems will remain.
“A little rough out there,” Hob says, sliding into the nook, across the table from her.
Eleanor loves mornings, but particularly mornings like this. It’s why Hob built the nook for her last year, one of the few things he made for her during their marriage that was truly useful. The nook gave her mornings a sense of place and direction, something they had been lacking before. It isn’t much, just a little slim table jutting from the wall, flanked by short benches just wide enough for a single person on each side. At first Eleanor thought it presumptuous that Hob had made two benches—she was possessive of her mornings, of the quiet before her day became a thing owned by other people—but Hob rarely joined her, somehow understanding that he wasn’t building a table for their little family but a submersible, a vessel for a woman who would happily sink to the bottom of the ocean and live there, alone, for the rest of her days, content with the view and with a few good books.
Eleanor watches the rain fall outside and agrees. “Indeed.”
“Rougher than usual,” Hob adds. He sips his tea with the faintest slurp.
Eleanor cringes, just a bit, but Hob notices.
“Sorry,” he says. “Habit.”
She knows. It’s what he says each time. She searches immediately for something to say next. If she doesn’t, he’ll take her silence as an invitation to explain the habit, and he’ll tell her again of his years during the war, the years stationed in Okinawa, of the Japanese way of slurping to indicate their pleasure with and appreciation of a dish.
“Do you think it will clear?” she asks, cupping her tea in her hands to warm them. Her fingers are long and narrow and envelop the mug. Her mother had wished her to play the piano, citing her fingers as the sole reason, but Eleanor had never felt music in her bones. She had tried, for a time, to please her mother. No—she had tried for
years
to please her mother. But after a few weeks of plinks and clanks on the old upright piano in the hallway, Eleanor had admitted defeat. Her mother had left the keys exposed, the wooden cover open, for the rest of her life, the dust gathering on the ivory a sort of tribute to her disappointment in Eleanor.
As if Eleanor had needed a reminder.
“News report says three days of this,” Hob answers, his stories of Okinawa forgotten. “We should stay in this afternoon,” he adds, almost hopefully.
Eleanor shakes her head. “No,” she says. “We don’t—”
“We don’t stay in,” Hob says, completing her familiar sentiment. “I know.”
“Good,” Eleanor says, lifting her tea to her lips. “You know better.”
Hob takes this personally, as he often does, and turns his attention intensely to his tea. He watches the steam curl up, and Eleanor notices his shoulders draw tight, the way that they do when one of his attacks begins. He unfolds his stubby fingers, then closes them around the cup, then unfolds them again. She can hear tiny snaps and pops from his knuckles.
“Hob,” she says, but already he can barely hear her. She knows this, but she speaks gently to him anyway. “Hob. Look at me, please.”
She repeats this three times before he finds the strength to lift his head. And it is strength that he requires, even for such a small thing.
This condition has not always been present. When she met Hob—nearly ten years ago now, she realizes—he wasn’t yet bowed by the memories of the war. He was, as men tended to be, proud—and even as they both recognized that something was changing in him, he’d rejected her suggestions that he talk to someone.