Unread.

“Why do you look at me with those eyes?” He asks.

She blinks and questions back “What eyes?”

She quickly flips through pages, whole chapters and lands at something more appropriate to be read.

“Imploring, begging. Hurtful, accusing, questioning….I..I don’t know. It’s many things. Many things at a moment’s notice. I don’t get it and it disturbs me”

She starts writing another story, a joke perhaps. Full of mirth, good cheer and nonchalance. All la-la-la, sunshine and rainbows.

She laughs. “You are so dramatic. You know, you should star in a soap”

“You…you…just.” A pause. So pregnant, it threatens to give birth to more. More hideous offsprings, growing alarmingly bigger and bigger, fed on spoonfuls of accusations, doubts and anxieties.

All caught embarrassingly in a mucky, coital embrace.

Abort it. Now.

Desperately, she scratches at the pages, writing furiously. Some story ought to surface, regurgitate its way out of the tired bowels of the past. Something. Anything.

“See? Now you look distracted. What are you looking at the ceiling for?” he says.

With fluttering lids, she writes another story. Of a butterfly she saw in the park. How beautiful it was, red, yellow, blue gliding like a ballerina in the air. She omits the part about how she saw only its tattered wings, how it flew in jerks, how it sputtered and reeled, a taint on its graceful kind.

Keep it happy, she told herself.

The tattered wing part must have sneaked its way in. Frantically, he mumbles something and leaves.

She writes the last chapter, following him with those imploring, begging, hurtful, accusing, questioning eyes.

She closes the book. She slams it shut. Tight.

And then she binds it with every taught nerve in the iris, hurling it into the black hole of the pupil.

That’s another book he’ll never read.