"The Rival" – short story of a woman who returns home after a mysterious absence

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It was winter when Laura left her husband without warning, and summer when she returned. A livid evening, fluorescent sunset; she was standing, dazed by the heat, outside her house. The curtains of the house were only half drawn. The living room was illuminated by a corner lamp and scattered with the detritus of the life she had disappeared from. Her grandmother’s rocking chair, the battered piano, the mirror with a crack in it. The rug that harbored moths. She did not remember where she had been.

Unlatching the gate, she hovered by the front door. It grew dark. The neighbor next door came home and ignored her. Laura shuffled from foot to foot. She knocked eventually, when the air became too cold. Her husband appeared from somewhere newly mysterious in the house, as quickly as if summoned, but did not acknowledge her except to hold the door open, just long enough for her to slip inside. She wondered if he had been waiting. There would have to be atonement, some reckoning—she braced for it—but he didn’t seem to have the appetite for it.

In the bathroom she took her time, brushing her teeth with an unfamiliar toothbrush found in the drawer. In the same drawer she counted three different brands of condoms. Then she went to bed and waited for him.

For the last six months she had been alone in a pale, large house. The house had many rooms, and was on a small island in the middle of a lake. It had been like living on an ice floe. In the back garden of the house was a maze made of marble, the walls high. She was afraid of the maze, but also drawn to it. When she approached it, she could sometimes hear the voices of other people inside it, though she never saw another person there.

The house was so quiet, with floors made of the same marble as the maze, and curtains of pale velvet and four-poster beds, and the sanatorium feeling of glasses of milk that appeared daily on her bedside table. Drinking this milk felt like drinking satin by the yard.

The only other living things on the island were large gulls, the size of cats. They perched on the white shingle of the shore, and spat themselves through the sky. She had been afraid of them at first, but they were tame, and if you sat on one of the white-painted benches that were placed just outside of the house you might be approached by one, and it might sit itself in your lap. When this happened, Laura would be overcome by a radiant peace. She spent much time chasing this feeling, but the gulls were bashful, selective. You had to be very still. She learned to stay for hours in one place without moving muscle or mind.

In the morning, she discovered her makeup bag still in the drawer where she had left it, next to the condoms. She put on her favorite lipstick and some powder. She left the bag itself out on the counter, to assert herself. She had anticipated a certain degree of hostility, but her husband had reacted disproportionately—makeup bag back in the drawer at once, generalized and non-specific shouting as he roamed the house, his face red and wet and his breathing heavy. She had given up the rights to her territory. The condoms alone told her that. She felt compassionate about their existence, their necessity. Of course he would have looked for consolation in the bodies of others. Of course it was in the physical that fleeting comfort could be most easily obtained. But she was back, and she had never really abandoned him. In the kitchen she put her arms around him and in his ear, she told him so. She kissed him on the neck the way he loved, and his safe and beautiful body shook as he whimpered with what she could only assume was relief in her arms as she told him, over and over, that she was sorry for leaving.

In the large pale house she made a concerted effort to remember her old life, one day, as she sat on a cream satin sofa. The images were attenuated, hazy, like the pirated trailer of a film. Here, a wedding that seemed to have little to do with her, even if she was the bride. There, a holiday somewhere hot and indistinct, the only clear memory compressed into the feeling of rough grains of sand studding her feet. Then she was skidding, somewhere, loosened from her bearings, a stutter in the memories, and then there was a birthday, the trailer back on track, Laura smiling as she lifted a glass of wine, and she tried to go back to where the tape had skipped, but it was no good.

Outside, a gull tottered to the window and tapped its beak against the glass. This was life now. Whatever strange convalescence she was engaged in wasn’t so bad, right? Her soul felt like it had been starched and set out to dry in the right shape.

One evening a woman with blonde hair that fell obediently to her shoulders came to the door. When Laura answered, the woman stared and stared.

I think you have the wrong house, Laura said.

Her husband walked up behind her, and invited her in. Laura turned to face him.

Who is she? she asked.

I think it’s best I go, said the woman. Her voice was calm and definite. It reminded Laura of someone, though she couldn’t place who.

But you’ve only just got here, said the husband, ignoring Laura.

I think it’s best that she goes, said Laura.

The woman looked to Laura, and then to her husband. Laura felt sorry for her predicament.

Come on, said the husband. I’m making spaghetti.

Laura stepped to the side as she stepped in, gingerly. She watched in alarm as her husband enfolded her in his arms, and then kissed.

Oh, said Laura. Oh, oh, oh.

She watched them eat the spaghetti by candlelight. He hadn’t put out a plate for her. That was fine. She didn’t want to eat in front of the rival, anyway. She leaned against the sink.

The rival wasn’t eating, either. She twirled the red noodles around her fork and glanced at Laura now and then. She was beautiful in a washed-out, meek kind of way. Laura wanted to wring her neck.

Don’t you like it? asked Laura’s husband.

You’ve got some nerve, Laura said to her.

The rival looked stricken. Her husband ignored Laura. He left the room briefly. The rival stared at Laura, wide-eyed, sitting on her hands. Laura couldn’t bear it. She took up a spaghetti-laden plate, deliberating.

Oh, please—said the rival, squeezing her eyes closed. Laura was already throwing the plate to the ground. Then she left the room before her husband could return and wrenched the door open, walked down the street.

Children were playing. Cigarette butts littered the ground; a motorcycle stuttered past, too loud. She walked to the local park and sat on the swings, until it became too cold to stay.

Back in the house, the rival had gone. Her husband was asleep in bed, deeply so, despite an open curtain.

I understand that you are trying to punish me, Laura said to him, very softly.

He was a sturdy man, her husband, principled and steady and strong. Falling in love with him had been gradual, not a matter of abandon. It had been a step that followed a step that followed another step, and so it had not felt like the great love story, until it had. Glimmering and persistent life under the surface, slow-burning.

She regretted leaving. She didn’t recall how she had ended up at the large, pale house in the middle of the water. She had been an insect directed only by its own internal, occult, instinct—prone to hijack, prone to atmospheric vibration. She hadn’t always loved the puny objects of her life, or the house, or even her husband, but she wouldn’t have wanted to actually go elsewhere, at least not forever.

She didn’t venture into the maze, but only because she was afraid of getting lost. There was pleasure instead in standing just outside its entrance, listening to the echoing of the voices she sometimes heard within.

In her solitude, she grew to know and love some of the voices. She gave them names. Big Husky was a broken, middle-aged male voice. Tiny Silver was a birdlike woman, either very young or very old, quavering. The Princess was a recent addition, a voice that belonged to a woman of indeterminate age, assured in a way that Laura envied, because she had always tripped over her syllables and pronounced even familiar words in wrong and nervous ways.

Listening to them speak was like picking up a telephone and hearing someone already on the line. They spoke with a calm reassurance, but she could only make out the odd word: happy, bulletin. Sometimes she heard her own name, or narcissism made her think she did, but to hear her own name made her uneasy and she didn’t love it. She would have to move away from the maze, then, and renew her peace elsewhere. Enough of that, she told herself. Enough.

Laura followed her husband to the train and sat opposite him as he refused to make eye contact, as he studiously ignored her. She trailed him to work and then hesitated outside of his office. The city felt loud, polluted. She ducked into a museum and walked the galleries, looking at paintings from hundreds of years ago. She felt moved by the contained scenes, the frozen light, and so closer to the world.

Turning into another gallery she saw, to her irritation, the rival standing in the center of the room. She turned around and walked quickly back where she had come from, but there were footsteps behind her, and a tap on the shoulder.

I think we got off on the wrong foot, the rival said, a little breathless. She smiled, and Laura had to admit that her smile was “winning.”

They went outside, to a nearby park, and sat on a bench. The rival nudged a pigeon with her toe and set it to flight.

You shouldn’t really be here, said the rival.

You’re out of your mind, Laura said, a little impressed at the gumption.

Don’t you recognize me? the rival asked. She cleared her throat.

This is a bulletin from the living to the dead, she said, the fluency of a script. We want you to know that everything is fine. Those you love are happy. Those you love are adjusting. We’d be glad to pass on a message. We’d be glad to hear about anything you see.

Oh, said Laura.

The rival, the princess , looked pleased.

I’d love to make a deal with you, she said.

Leaves fell nearby. Laura could sense them, being now an observer of living things. The air prickled. It felt new.

As time had passed, inside the large and beautiful pale house, Laura had felt herself pulled in two directions. There was the part of her that was drifting, happy to lie in silk sheets and drink milk and sit with a gull on her lap, rapt, staring into eternity. And there was the part of her that was more lucid, drawing her back to the entrance of the maze, trying to piece together the message that was being transmitted. The periods of lucidity came without warning, felt increasingly urgent, even as she sensed that the drifting part of her might take over. But before that happened, she thought, she should try to make it through the maze, or at least make it far enough that she could hear the voices clearly.

She broached the entrance, and soon managed to get as far as the first bend. It wasn’t so bad at all. The light was diffuse. There were occasional wings beating in the sky above her.

What the rival had proposed, on the bench in the park, was to swap bodies for a short while. A day. Possibly two.

Me and my friends are a little closer to whatever veils are cast over the world than most, she explained, coyly.

What would you get out of it? Laura asked.

To see what it’s like to be you, said the rival.

It’s normal, said Laura. It’s like anything.

The rival stood up, brushed herself down.

Think about it, she said.

Their house had been burgled shortly after they moved in, years ago. Laura remembered the tentative refiguring of the territory, and how sometimes she could be sitting on the sofa, or on a chair in the kitchen, and disgust would engulf her at the idea of an intruder taking this route, or that route, ransacking this drawer first.

Now Laura walked those same routes, reorienting herself with a place that had been changed by her absence, the way that her husband had been changed by her absence. She remembered the small watermark of red wine left on the floorboard behind the sofa, and the imprint of her body on that same sofa, but she wasn’t sure if the house remembered, or if it had given her up. Really, she knew that to the house, their bodies were just columns of matter around which light and dust congregated. It had no feelings for her return, whether corporeal or spectral.

Her husband was sat on the sofa when she got home. She was in front of him. Her hand fell to his shoulder, softly, and at that he startled and got to his feet at once. He looked around confusedly, and for a moment looked straight at her, right into her eyes. He left the room and went upstairs. He got into bed even though it was only seven. Laura followed him, curled her body gently into his on top of the covers, lying there as all the streetlamps came on outside.

She thought of the gulls. They were so strange, and so familiar. Their bodies were so warm.

You could not compete with flesh and blood, with presence, she realized, there on the bed. You could not compete with those things at all.

That night Laura inspected her hands in the light of the bathroom. To her they seemed like regular hands, fine hands even, nothing translucent or filmy or clammy or any of the expected adjectives. Feeling quite stupid, she found herself leaning out of the large sash window, and then she climbed out, so she was perched on its sill. Before she could think too much about it, she jumped, and in doing so she became pollen and sunset and air, the whirring machinations of moths and fireflies. She was light, a beaming thread of it.

She moved swiftly, intuitively, to the beer garden on the canal where she had spent so many evenings, where she now became smoke, perfume sweated off, words on the lips of others. Skimming closely over the filthy water of the canal itself, spray and swerve, she moved past the canalboats moored on the side, inhabitants sat on rickety chairs on their decks.

She swooped daringly close to the highest windows of the tower blocks beyond the canal, the warehouses and industrial sites, the rows of terraces, the parks green and flat and empty below her. Then it was dark and she was going faster, high above the city, buffered by wind, and she was starting to feel a little out of control, but then she found herself halting, suddenly, at a window. Through the window she saw the rival, alone on a cast-iron bed. She wore a white nightgown and was curled up, asleep, on top of the sheets. Laura surveyed her flushed cheeks, her bruised legs, with a consumer’s eye. Perhaps, she thought as she travelled back, it would not hurt to try her body on for size.

It wasn’t the rival’s voice that persuaded Laura to walk the length of the maze, but the absence of her husband’s voice.

If I am here, then where are you? she shouted at its entrance one evening at twilight, as if he might hear it. Her voice was startling in the clear blue air. Two gulls bobbed around her ankles.

If I have left, why are you not after me, nimble of foot, ready to drag me home? Did you really just let me leave without a fight?

The other voices continued their smooth babble, but deeper in the maze they fell away for a moment, as if holding their breath. It was quiet everywhere. She turned a corner, and then another, and then another, for a long time, and then darkness, and then she was knocking on the door of her house, and the maze was forgotten. The large pale house, the gulls and the milk—all was forgotten.

The next time the rival came to the house she was pink in the face, talking quickly to Laura’s husband whilst glancing at Laura, hovering behind him all the while. It wasn’t long before the three of them went up the stairs and into the bedroom, walking close together.

Laura’s husband lay on the bed as the rival stood next to it, expectant. She looked towards Laura, who felt shy, suddenly, unsure of what to do. She stepped forwards, intuitively, close enough that her nose was almost touching the rival, that she could smell the peach shampoo of her hair. The rival closed her eyes, shivered, nodded almost imperceptibly. Permission. Laura stepped right into her body, felt a small resistance and then the give as the rival slithered, eagerly, into the air.

Laura shook out her new arms, from the socket to the fingertip. She couldn’t see the rival, or whatever was left of her, anywhere. She raised the rival’s hands to her face, examined with wonder the soft skin of her palms, smaller than hers had been.

Everything all right? asked her husband, from the bed. Laura turned to him.

Just taking my time, she said in the rival’s precise, low voice. Her husband wrinkled his forehead, momentarily, as if trying to place her.

There she was, on the bed, a body that was not her body, moving as the rival, her limbs longer and lighter, her skin shivering, or maybe it was that she had just forgotten what it was like to have limbs and skin at all. She had certainly forgotten touch, she realized as she orchestrated touch, let herself be touched in turn. Finally, her husband was looking her in the eye, finally his hand against the curve of her shoulder, fingers in her hair. She was close to his body in the way that only another body could be close.

The rival came more intensely than she did, she noted with some interest, later on. The rival’s calves cramped. The rival’s hair, longer and more delicate, tangled the way that hers never had. The rival’s fingers fidgeted almost involuntarily, the rival’s nose tingled slightly at the tip, the rival had a pale appendix scar neat against her rounded stomach, and the rival’s heart beat slightly slower, a heavier heart, Laura decided as she felt her way around the entirety of her syrupy blood and half-empty stomach and pulsing lungs. She could taste the lemon cake the rival had eaten for breakfast. She could sense what the rival had told her, that for her the veils between the worlds were more permeable than for others—a quirk, a receptiveness to the inherent aliveness of things. And she was grateful to feel the universe trembling around her. She wasn’t the rival, not anymore, and this quality didn’t live in the body, but elsewhere.

In the bathroom mirror, Laura made the rival’s face perform different expressions. Laughter, pain, adoration. She applied some mascara, carefully, from her old makeup bag and pulled back the rival’s hair, the way she had often worn her own.

A pressure filled the room—a slight change in the atmosphere. The rival’s voice was in her ear, quiet and insistent.

Time to switch back, she said.

Already? said Laura.

I don’t like it, said the rival.

But Laura resisted. At first it was instinctive. She held herself firm inside the rival’s body.

A little longer? she asked.

No, said the rival’s voice. It’s time.

Laura felt the rival’s ghost or essence spring away from her, as surely as if repelled. In the rival’s body, Laura zipped up the makeup bag, and left it on the counter. She looked at her new reflection once more. The voice continued to hiss, but it was softer. She felt a few light bumps against the rival’s body, not powerful enough to knock her out of it, not even close. She laughed in delight and batted the rival’s hand around her ear, as if swatting a fly.

I’m not ready yet, she said. You understand, don’t you?

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Sophie Mackintosh’s story “The Rival” appears in issue 5 of Kismet , a new literary magazine of spirituality, religion and mysticism for seekers and skeptics alike. Subscribe or purchase copies at https://kismet-mag.com/shop/ .