Fiction from David Yourdon

Photo: Nikita Tikhomirov

Cliché

And then he died.

The day before, he had felt well, calm. Not an end-of-life, transcendent calm. We didn’t believe in that. But the pain had abated.

A month before, the pain had been worse. By then, we had set up camp in the hospital. It was clear that we were never going to leave. Well, I was. He wasn’t. Still, the business of living had occupied most of our hours. How do we get food? Where can we store our bags? When will the din of visitors subside?

Several months before, he was fighting. “Fighting,” in quotation marks. We said that word only once, by accident. Everyone else said it ad nauseam. Cards arrived in the mail with images of boxers and you-can-do-it maxims. He stumbled around the house. He slept during the day and lay awake at night. Time was molasses.

A year before, he got the diagnosis. It came from nowhere: no family history, no ache preceding it. We felt that we had just found each other, that a treasure was being stolen from us. And yet it didn’t seem insurmountable. There was a future blooming. We were hanging up paintings in our new place. He owned a greater share of the house, since he had more money. I would pay him back in time.

Two years before, we were in our honeymoon phase. Honeymoons aren’t supposed to last that long. All my previous partners had gotten tired of my tics, my insistence on eating the entire muffin, my hidden hurt. He gazed at me rhapsodically on our anniversary. He had an enormous box of chocolate muffins delivered to my office.

Three years before, we met in the rose garden. That signifier of romance, roses, hadn’t been a conscious choice. The garden was a convenient meeting place, halfway between our houses, with a pond and a half-moon of benches, private paths to wander down. I was early. When I saw him approaching, time stood still.

Twenty years before, my high school poetry teacher told the class about cliché. I had never heard the word. He said it was when a phrase got used so much that it lost its power. The example he provided: time stood still. I asked him why people use clichés if they have no power. Because, he said, they’re true.
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David Yourdon is a writer based in Canada. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, HAD, Peatsmoke Journal, Bending Genres, and Rejection Letters; this last story appeared in the 2022 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. He has also completed a novel and posts fiction on his Substack, What Will It Be Like.