Standing there, looking down and you don’t believe he’s gone, into the earth, when: a tap on the shoulder.

“Don’t take their word for it,” she says, she who did the tapping and is standing there, smart in black, smart and blonde in a suit and looking not her age, which is your age. “Mary Margaret, get down in there and see,” she says, herself unlikely to climb into open graves, herself unlikely to attract even dust.

“Sylvie,” you say and you know, although a stranger, she is no stranger, with her short and blonde, her smart and black.

“Not so changed, am I?” says the stranger who isn’t. And the face is the same face of the time with dolls and crayons and walking through the schoolyard arm in arm, of sharing secrets and swapping stories, and crying in toilets when one hissed Mary Margaret how could you and the other wept and left. You are only smiling then and you can smile because of the terrible time it is and because of your loss and the hole, beside and inside you, and here she is not filling it and perhaps but a drop of that.

You grab her arm towards the shoulder and though you grip with the strength of ten she stands and does not shake and she is there, rock-like, for you, although years and years since the last time, minutes and hours and the universe has expanded, but it allows this now, because you need.

“You want me to say,” and you look into her face, and it can’t be that you don’t see her hair now so short, now so unfull of the way it had been, the way it was her pride and joy and daily brushing made it so, and you with your hand on the scissors, waiting, waiting, and her sleeping, sleeping.

“Nothing,” says Sylvie, who is becoming herself then, shaping up in front of you to be less than black-suited and less than smart and blonde. “Mary Margaret, I don’t know about anything that wants expressing.” And when she looks into you you can stop gripping so tight and you can stop shaking yourself on the edge of the place where he is, and you step backwards once and then twice and then you turn and she follows.

Sitting in the bar, in the small room with people pressing on all sides, with people talking about him, you and she talk about other things, other times. There is grinning, and in her face you see the older, the younger. Sentences beginning with

“Do you remember the time…?” And you do, how could you not.

+

Much later, after the hellos and goodbyes, wishing wells of people passing who pass you and have passed you all their lives and yours, Sylvie stands up.

“Margaret?” she says and you look because it’s the first time.

“It is,” you say.

“It fits,” says she now back to looking her age, although the ghost of that long long hair still falls down her back and the ghost of your small, fat, childish fingers is touching it for the first time. “Two names is a burden, all that time it takes, all those minutes while you are saying it. Lighter, just like this.”

You smile. You think about the lightness, and then with it comes the grave, again. And though you are looking at Sylvie, you are standing and peering down into it.

“Part of me,” you say to her. “Part of me wants to be in there, with him.”

Sylvie stays standing, doesn’t reach out, doesn’t touch.

“Part of you is,” she says. And then, picking up her handbag, kissing you on the cheek, just a brush of the lips really, just the wing of a moth. And then: gone.

+++

Tania Hershman’s first book, The White Road and Other Stories, (Salt Modern Fiction), was commended, 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. Tania’s stories are published or forthcoming in, among others, Smokelong Quarterly, Elimae, the London Magazine, Riptide, BRAND, Dogzplot, Eyeshot, Electric Velocipede and Nature. A week of Tania’s flash fiction was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in June 2010. Tania is currently writer-in-residence in Bristol University’s Science Faculty. www.taniahershman.com