The Other Shore: Two Stories of Love and Death

by Paul Hina

reaction to a wondrous serendipity.

  But he's not ready for these poems. Not yet.

  He sits the box aside and stands up. He moves back to the windows, leans against the file boxes again and stares outside.

  "You opened it."

  He turns toward the door. Laura is standing there.

  "Sorry. Did I wake you when I left?"

  "It doesn't matter. I wasn't really sleeping anyway," she says, moving toward him, placing her hand on his back and kissing his cheek. "You?"

  "No, I didn't sleep well, either."

  "You opened the box," she says.

  "Yeah, I got as far as the title page."

  "That far?"

  "I don't know what I was thinking coming here today."

  "Maybe it just feels good to have somewhere to go," she says. "Besides, doesn't it feel nice to be around the work. It makes me feel close to him."

  "Me, too."

  "So, what do you want to do now?"

  "I hadn't thought that far ahead," he says. "What I'd really like to do is kiss you."

  "You would?"

  "Can we do that here?"

  "Who's going to stop us?" she asks.

  He takes a step toward her, puts his left hand on her hip and touches her face with his right hand. He traces her cheekbone with the backs of his fingers. By now, the light from the windows is shining over her face and it reminds him of yesterday, watching her in the light of his dad's doorway as his dad sang to Susannah.

  He kisses her and she kisses him back, and they melt into one another with the ease of a new breathing. And what started out as a slow, casually intended kiss, grows into a fervor that's difficult for either of them to contain. And as they're about to lose control, Laura falls into the stack of file boxes, and Simon falls into her.

  "You alright," Simon says, standing up.

  "I don't know what happened," she says, getting up. "I just lost my… Wow."

  They both stare at the boxes. The one that Laura fell into has a dent on the top. She takes the top off the box to try and repair it. Simon looks inside the box, and it's full of papers. As he rummages through the pages in the box, he knows that they have a lot of work ahead of them.

  "I don't think we're going to get much done today—not me, anyway. But, since we're here I'd like to stack these boxes over by the desk in chronological order, and then…" He stops, looks at Laura. The sun is still shining across her face. "Then I'd like to take you to your bedroom or a broom closet or anywhere, really, and see what happens."

  "I like that idea," she says.

  "Me, too," he says, grabbing a box and moving it toward the desk. "I'll start with the most recent and stack up from there," he says, looking at the dates on the boxes and grabbing the most recent.

  "I'll help," Laura says.

  As they move the boxes from the side wall to the side of the desk, Simon is unconsciously humming 'You Send Me.'

  Laura sits a box down by the desk and stares at him.

  "What?" he asks.

  "You were humming?" she says, a big smile on her face.

  "I was?"

  "It's the same song your dad was singing to Susannah yesterday."

  "I didn't realize," he says, sitting another box down.

  "Strange feeling, isn't it, to be so sad and so happy at the same time?" she says.

  "It is," he says. "Kind of feels like a gift."