Genesis, Submission 1 by Ryan Wrenn

“But where would we go?”

“Wherever”

“’Wherever’,” he repeats and rolls his eyes, still smiling, stares a brief moment at the tree logo painted on the wall behind her desk at reception. It’s flowering.

“The Bahamas then. Someplace warm”

“Sounds a bit cliché, don’t you think?”

It’s her turn to roll her eyes. She suddenly spots movement behind him and straightens in her chair, returning to her computer and the Word document she keeps open to appear busy. He instinctively stands up straight in a quick jerk, turns. The glass door opens, and in walks Roy from design.

“Mr. Crosby!” he bellows as he sidles up to the reception desk, extending a meaty hand. Craig thinks to himself as he shakes tepidly that he can’t recall a single instance when Roy had referred to anyone by their first name. His formality was softened by a toothy smile and a penchant for high-fives, but Craig had never been able to shake the feeling that perhaps Roy never bothered to remember that he was Craig, and that she was Vanessa, or that anyone was any different than their fathers and mothers.

“What brings you up here so early, Roy?” Vanessa asks as she looks up from her computer for the first time since he walked through the door.

“Looking for a package from marketing, wondering if the lovely Ms. Shanks had perhaps seen it,” he says as he playfully pretends to look behind her desk. An excuse to look down the front of her shirt. Craig cringes slightly and walks to the small coffee table in the waiting area, pretends to shuffle through the magazines neatly stacked next to a half-full bowl of mints. He stops on a travel magazine featuring some barren white beach. The waves are pulling away, back into the ocean. He smiles.

“And you, Mr. Crosby?,” Roy says as her turns away from the desk, leaving Vanessa to search through the day’s mail for his package. “Why’re you lingering about? Accounting getting boring?”

Craig drops the magazine back on the pile and looks back. “Heh, nah. No, Vanessa just had a message for me.”

“The wife?,” Roy asks, losing interest. Vanessa looks up from her desk, staring straight at Craig. Strands of bright, almost unnaturally red hair fall over her face. She doesn’t blink. The silence stretches but Roy doesn’t appear to notice.

“My dry-cleaning will be ready at 5”

“You use the Vietnamese place down the street?” he asks, suddenly piqued again. “It’s the greatest, I…”

“Found it!” Vanessa exclaims before he can go on. Craig sighs with relief. She slides the bulky manila envelope across the desk toward Roy’s turning form.

“Perfecto. Thanks Ms. S,” he picks up the envelope and turns it over in his hands. “Well I’m off then. You two get back to work, ya here?”

And they’re alone again. Some song from the early eighties whispers across the room to him from the small radio behind her desk. A song he knew and loved once. A song she is too young to be nostalgic about.

“The Bahamas then. This weekend”

“The Bahamas then. This weekend,” she echoes with a smile and a slightly shaking movement of her hand across her face, pushing her hair again behind her ear. “For how long?”

“For good?”

She smiles widely now and pulls away from her desk, leaning back in her high-backed leather desk chair. Studying him. She leans far enough back for the chair to rest on the trunk of the tree mural. For the first time Craig notices how precisely her hair matches the single apple hanging from the tree’s lowest branch.

“For good”