Bill nodded. He was too choked up to say anything. This was the same beautiful woman he had fallen for, but it was as if what they had earlier was gone, almost like they were strangers, and he couldn’t stand the thought of that.
They sat in an increasingly oppressive silence for several brutally long minutes, both of them seeming incapable of breaking it. Finally Emily offered him the saddest damn smile he had ever seen. He knew she was struggling to keep from weeping also.
“I’m sorry, Bill,” she said, tears seeping from her eyes. “I can’t do this. I wish so much I could, but I can’t. That memory of you covered in blood and the things you said is so real in my head. When I look at you it’s all I see.”
“It’s not real,” Bill said. “You know it never happened.”
“I know it isn’t real. God, I know it isn’t. But I can’t help how real it seems. I’m so, so sorry.”
She fled the room then. Bill heard the apartment door open and close. He wanted to chase after her, but it was as if all his strength had bled out of him and he couldn’t have moved if his life depended on it. He started sobbing then. He was ashamed of it, but he couldn’t help it. With everything he had lost in his life; his mom, his childhood, so many close friends, losing Emily just seemed as if it were the one loss he wouldn’t be able to recover from. As he cried, Augustine jumped onto the table and first started meowing loudly to get Bill to stop, then pushed his nose into Bill’s until he finally did stop. That was when he heard more knocking outside his door. Wiping his sleeve across his face, he got up and answered it. Emily stood there, her face as much a wreck as his own, her eyes red as if she’d been crying also, her skin pale and blotchy.
With a desperate smile, she said, “Maybe if we make enough new memories, we can someday push that one memory out of my head.”
Bill nodded, unable to talk.
As she moved towards him and their lips touched, the massive distance separating them vanished in that one heartbeat, and before too long they were busy making new memories.
The End
About Dave Zeltserman:
I was born in Boston and have lived in the Boston area my whole life except for five years when I was at the University of Colorado in Boulder working on my B.S. in Applied Math and Computer Science.
I spent a lot of hours as a kid watching old movies with Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers, and film noir being my favorite, especially The Roaring Twenties, The Third Man and The Maltese Falcon. I also always read a lot, everything from comic books, Mad Magazine, pulps (Robert E. Howard was my favorite), and science fiction. When I was 15 and spending a few weeks during the summer at my uncle's house in Maine, I picked up a dog-eared copy of I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane, and from that point on was hooked on crime fiction. From Spillane, I moved on to Hammett, Chandler, Rex Stout, Ross Macdonald, and lots of other crime writers before eventually discovering Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford in the early 90s. Thompson, in particular, had a big impact on my writing, not only in the way he got into the heads of broken psychopaths and had you rooting for them, but in the way he took chances in his writing. For years before I read my first Jim Thompson novel, Hell of a Woman, I was trying to write what amounted to bad Ross Macdonald. Once I started reading Thompson, it opened my eyes to how I could break every rule I wanted to as long as I could make it work, and this led me to finding my own voice. My first book, Fast Lane, was probably equally inspired by Macdonald and Thompson--it had the sins of the father theme that Macdonald did so well, but written from the unreliable narrator and mind of the killer that Thompson excelled at. Years after writing Fast Lane, I read about Macdonald's last unfinished Lew Archer novel, and was amazed to find that it had a major plot-point in common with Fast Lane.
After I graduated college I got a job developing data communication software, and over the years have worked at some of the world's leading networking and computer companies, including Motorola, DEC, Nokia, Lucent and Cisco Corporation. Off and on over the years I would be drawn to writing, usually dark crime fiction, but it always seemed more of a lark than anything real. I was a math and computer science guy, and outside of one creative writing course in college, and books I read on the subject, I never had any formal training in it--I was writing mostly at an instinctive and gut level. But a kind of crazy creative fever took over while I was working on Fast Lane, and when I was done I had something that I knew could be published someday, as well as a book that crime noir readers would enjoy. It turned out that day was 12 years after I wrote it, and I first sold the Italian rights to Meridiano Zero before Point Blank Press published it. During those 12 years I had a lot of ups and downs, mostly downs where I'd quit writing to focus on my software engineering career. It's been a long road but things are now looking up. I've had stories published in a lot of places, including Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as a 3-book 'man just out of prison' noir series that is being published by the prestigious UK publisher, Serpent's Tail (Small Crimes, Pariah, Killer), as well as books Fast Lane, Bad Thoughts and Bad Karma (Five Star Mysteries). And while it took a while, I know from the letters I get from noir fans who discover Fast Lane that I was right about it. These days I'm spending my time writing crime fiction and studying martial arts (I hold a black belt in Tiger-Crane style of Kung Fu), and enjoying every minute of it.
http://www.davezeltserman.com
Table of Contents
Title page
DYING MEMORIES
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
About Dave Zeltserman:
Table of Contents
Title page
DYING MEMORIES
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
About Dave Zeltserman: