TW // Grief
Magda held her grief in her hands; it was a cube, still and silent, vital in its immediacy, and seemed to throb with potential. The cardboard was clean and strapped down with thick, white tape. She lifted it up to her eye-line to inspect it, check it for holes, blemishes, signs of tampering, but there were none.
It was almost seven days exactly since Hugo had died, but it felt as though it were a moment existing in perpetuity just beyond a door she could not see. That exact moment, the moment of experiential undoing was always within reach; she could summon it with a thought, intentional or not, and it would undo her all over again.
A lot can happen in a week. Your soul can be obliterated, your life defragmented, and then righted slightly, before being tossed back into the stream of existence. Though now it just washed over her. It no longer eased her along with a soft and loving caress, it smothered her and left her for dead. People just went on living as though nothing had happened. She first experienced it as a child, when her nan died. The shock - anger, even - of normality resuming: the post that slaps the doormat; the drivers who roll past the house with singing, smiling faces, or frowning, swearing growls of rage; the newsreaders with a faux smile and a pile of meaningless stories. Why aren’t you all obliterated too?
That was the worst thing: the inanity. The calls to the bank, the energy supplier, the life insurance, the car insurance (as if I will ever drive anywhere ever again!), the fucking TV package she never wanted in the first place! It was always the same: the script-read “how can I help you?”, followed by the panicked “Oh!” and then the inevitable, patronising, “oh I am sorry, madam” before an over-long looping of hold music where she can almost hear them standing in the call centre and shouting “what do I do? This woman’s husband is dead!”
Magda had spent more time on the phone in the last week than she had in the preceding five years. And she loathed being on the phone. It seemed an unnecessary punishment to accompany her grief. These people bend over backwards taking every piece of data about me at every opportunity, every cookie, every step, every tap, every “Alexa…?”, every ring at the door, every single purchase, but this…? This I have to spoon-feed you.
And then she froze. The necessary tasks had been completed and life seemed to just remain there, waiting to be lived, and she had to go on. She ate the scraps in the fridge before they went mouldy, went through the motions of sleeping, washing, getting dressed, and then just stopped. She couldn’t bring herself to re-start her living process without Hugo. She checked her bank account, and the money in there belonged to them both. How could she now spend any of it on anything at all? How could she buy food for just her? Or clothes? Anything? It was all devoid of meaning, and it just cemented the reality that he was no longer there. She sat, stomach rumbling, staring at the ground in her frozen state for a day and a half before she stumbled upon the solution: closure.
And now she held the closure in her hands. They had spent hours watching YouTube videos of people buying and opening mystery boxes they had found on eBay, or Gumtree, and always said they should do the same, but never got around to it. This was the thing they would buy. The last thing that they would buy together and then she would force herself to move on. It was something of which she knew he would approve; it was a parting gift to his memory, and the memory of the unlived dreams that were filed away for eternity somewhere.
It had arrived that morning and all she had done was take it from the postman and sit on the floor with it in her lap, clamped between dry hands, uncertain what to do next. Traffic trundled towards unknown, unimportant purposes. A distant phone rang in a neighbouring house, its shrill demands for attention caught in the thin walls that seemed to lean in on her grief.
The knife caught a bright slither of sun as she twisted it in her hand. This was Hugo’s favourite knife: the avocado knife, the peeling knife, the I-can’t-find-a-screwdriver-and-this-handle-is-loose knife. She plunged it into the box, slicing the tape into two separate, grappling strips, carefully running it at a slight angle so as not to jeopardise its contents. The box echoed the crunching tear as the knife ran across its top.
Unlocked: the flaps that marked its top levitated a half inch, now they were free from their restraint. Magda drew breath and parted them to embrace something of a future. The inside was cold, spherical. She placed her hands around the cold sphere within and closed her eyes, as though it might just fill her mind with a vision from beyond. But the ball was plastic, not crystal, and this was real life. She pulled the ball out and weighed it in her hands: heavy, full of liquid. A Magic 8 Ball.
The cultural phenomenon was in her hands and her smile reflected back at her from the smooth, polished black surface. Never before has she seen one in the flesh. This was something that had always existed on the periphery of her reality; like cricket, or koalas, or communism … it was extraneous, other, just accepted as an element of this world - a crucial aspect to others - and yet wholly inconsequential. American television programmes had shown them, and maybe a boy in her school had had one. Maybe it had found its way into the Argos catalogue she had abused with circled demands before many a Christmas. But now here it was: shining, black and full of potential.
She could feel the tears behind her eyes and the tightness in her throat. Her stomach fluttered with the weight of what was to come, as though she was rocking on the balls of her feet at the top of a bungee jump. This is it, Mags. Take the leap.
“I guess this is it then, isn’t it?” She managed as a tear fell from her eye and skimmed down the nearside of the ball. She bit her lip as she shook the gadget and listened at the water within slop against the unknown, magical innards, harnessing an appropriate destiny.
A smile found her lips and creased her cheeks, which forced tears down them in waves of release as she read the words that emerged from the enplasticed gloom: MOST LIKELY.