Grief Algebra
We sit in silence around a table of four. We’re only three, because someone is missing. His chair is empty and will remain silent until someone visits and sits there, unaware of the value this chair held. We’ll look at them like they’re undefined operation, like they’re savage or sacrilegious and they won’t ever know how profane and confusing what they did truly was. We were all present once and we had it all figured out and all the chairs were loud and resolved without a remainder, but now the picture is incomplete, like someone caught us off guard and stole one of us and left an unknown x in that empty place.
roommate vacated=-1 burden
We sit in silence until One talks. One says he went to places now that he’s free, as if a huge burden has been lifted from his shoulders. He lifts his eyes, stares through the negative space left behind, at the empty chair, and he thinks he can handle this when he grabs a glass and fills it with wine and he drinks like there’s no tomorrow, as if he’s turned into his Tyler Durden self, the one who doesn’t give a damn about things, because he did everything right, and despite his effort and sacrifice, it didn’t end well and we all die.
gymnastics-sleep-food=permanence
We sit in silence until Two talks. Two says he stayed home, he couldn’t eat or sleep or work. Two won’t look at the chair when he talks about the future, he says, I’m growing old, and what he means is that there will be nobody to take care of him, and One shrugs, as if saying, I’m not doing this again, and Two looks away like he knows how to handle this, because Two lifts weights and exercises and he’ll never be the dependent variable someone must carry, and he’ll never get old and needy.
time elapsed (t=2 months)/ spatial distance=safety
We sit in silence until Three talks. Three rises and goes to the door, like he’ll watch the scene from afar. He says it’s time to move on. Three will outrun this decaying function if he’s far enough, fast enough, but emotions overwhelm him when he looks at the chair, because feelings aren’t his thing, he knows emotions and talks emotions and explains emotions, and he thinks he knows how to handle this, but he’s terrified when they approach like monsters who chase him and if they catch him, they’ll rip him apart.
system collapse
We sit in silence and we don’t talk. One smokes, Two counts repetitions, Three watches a TV show, and we think that we know math, that we speak math, and that we got this, but then we all turn to the chair, and we hate the chair, and want to burn the chair down and leave this house forever. We take it outside, but this won’t help, because we know the chair is outside, we can’t pretend that we don’t. We go out, get wasted, turn into numbers a force above is counting down until we all vanish, because Four was here once and now he isn’t, and we can’t ever find unknown x and solve this rigged equation and be fine, because no one taught us grief algebra, or how empty chairs hurt.
Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece, and the author of We Fade with Time and Christmas People from Alien Buddha Press. Her work has been selected for the Best Microfiction anthology and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals, such as The Forge, Necessary Fiction, Passages North, Fractured Lit, and others. She’s a flash fiction editor for Blood+Honey and The Argyle Literary Magazine.
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