THE STRANGER

By MG Allan [Second place]

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Jasper found the manuscript on a flash drive that had been shoved in the back of a drawer in Morty’s desk.

This was almost six months after Morty’s heart attack. It took Jasper that long to feel emotionally stable enough to really go through Morty’s things. Jasper had left his late husband’s office like a shrine, gathering dust to weight down all the memories. He could barely walk into the room without breaking into sobs.

More than any other room in the house, the office felt imbued with Morty’s presence. This had been his domain, what he might have called his “man-cave” if both he and Jasper hadn’t found the term cishet levels of gross. Post-COVID, Morty had worked exclusively from home. Print journalism was on its deathbed, and therefore most of the reporters for the Herald began working from home. Morty had done all his research, made all his video calls, and written all his articles here at this desk. Jasper could almost see him sitting there now, the glow from the computer screen painting his face in an eldritch light.

The idea of cleaning out the office, deciding what to keep and what to throw out, filled Jasper with a dread so profound it almost robbed him of breath. Even after half a year, he wasn’t sure he was strong enough for it. Still, it had to be done. Jasper planned to sell the house and move somewhere smaller, somewhere more affordable.

His “keep” pile was impressively mountainous, the “donate pile” more like an afterthought, but each piece carried so much meaning. The desk itself was one Morty had bought at eighteen with some of his high school graduation money. Jasper couldn’t get rid of that. The antique brass desk lamp was something Morty had cherished, and that made Jasper cherish it despite having once thought of it as rather gaudy. All the clippings of Morty’s articles throughout the years, the oldest ones gone yellow and brittle, those couldn’t be discarded as trash.

Jasper did concede getting rid of most of Morty’s clothes since they had worn completely different sizes in everything. He kept a few pieces that had sentimental value, but the rest he boxed up and donated to good will. Jasper also parted with Morty’s collection of ceramic and glass swans that he kept in a glass cabinet in the corner of the office. He went back and forth on that one for a while, but in the end the fowl also went to Goodwill.

While going through the desk itself, Jasper found mostly a collection of pens and old receipts and scraps of paper with notes for articles scribbled on them. He almost missed the flash drive, as it was all the way in the back corner of the drawer, black so that it blended in with the shadows.

Jasper popped it into the computer, expecting to find news articles or tax papers or old photos. What he hadn’t expected to find was a novel.

At first he didn’t know what he was looking at. The flash drive contained only one file, a Word document entitled merely “Stranger.” Jasper opened it and initially couldn’t make sense of what he was looking at. The first page of the document certainly looked like a title page, everything neatly centered.

THE STRANGER

A novel by Mortimer Sullivan

84,690 words

A novel? Morty had written a novel? Not only had he never mentioned such a thing, he had also never even alluded to having the desire to do such a thing. Morty had liked to read, certainly, but he’d held no ambitions to be a novelist himself. Not that he’d ever mentioned to Jasper at least.

Jasper went back to the file to check the last date modified. Seven months ago, which meant only one month before Morty’s death. Only one month before his death, he’d still been tinkering with a novel that he’d never told his husband he was writing in the first place.

How long had he been working on it? Jasper did some quick Googling to see if there was a way to find that out. There was. He right-clicked on the file and went to Properties to check the created date.

Three years ago. Morty had been secretly working on a novel for three years.

Jasper had a hard time wrapping his brain around this. In a weird way, he thought it was a little like finding out his husband had been cheating on him. He knew that was a ridiculous comparison, but he couldn’t think of any other analogy that captured what Jasper felt at this moment. Not exactly a sense of betrayal, but more like Morty had been hiding some part of himself. And despite twenty-two years of marriage, sharing the same bed every night, knowing one another better than anyone else in the world, that part of Morty was a stranger to Jasper.

Maybe he’d been embarrassed. Perhaps he feared the novel wasn’t very good and that showing it to Jasper would only confirm that fear. Jasper, after all, was known for his blunt honesty. If he thought a pair of pants was unflattering on Morty, he’d say so. If something Morty fixed for dinner tasted bland, he’d say so. If Morty put on some extra pounds, he’d say so.

Morty had always said that refusal to sugarcoat was one of the things he loved most about Jasper, but Jasper realized that might also be intimidating when you were going outside your wheelhouse to try something new. A novel he’d spent three years working on. Possibly blunt honesty was a frightening prospect in such a case.

Had Jasper inadvertently made Morty afraid to share this project with him? Or had he simply wanted the book to be as perfect as possible before sharing it? Three years seemed like a long time to strive for perfection, but also aligned with Morty’s personality.

Jasper scrolled down past the title page to Chapter One. He began to read, intending to simply sample a bit, but after devouring the first four chapters he realized he’d been sitting at the desk for an hour. The plot had immediately drawn him in. A gay man caring for his dying mother, a woman so afflicted with dementia that she didn’t even recognize her own son. Devoid of her personality, she seemed like a stranger to him, and she literally saw him as a stranger, so the title had a double meaning.

Where had Morty come up with this idea? His mother had died from cervical cancer ten years ago, and Jasper’s was still living. Therefore, this hadn’t come from actual experience. Something he’d seen on TV or an article he’d had to write for the paper?

Jasper continued reading, and he ended up reading late into the night. Pausing only for bathroom breaks and to eat a nutritious dinner of cold Pop Tarts and Diet Pepsi. He kept thinking he’d break off after one more chapter, then one more chapter after that, then just one more chapter. He had never been much of a reader, not like Morty, and it usually took him at least two months to get through a single book.

Yet Jasper stayed up until a milky light began to leak through the window. He didn’t stop until he reached the all-caps bold THE END.

Then he merely sat there, ignoring the stiffness in his joints from having been in the same position for so many hours, feeling almost as if the story had put him in some kind of trance. The writing wasn’t perfect by any means. A little too much passive voice, a couple of convenient plot developments that relied too heavily on coincidence, and the main character had a boyfriend that lacked development, coming off as a bit too one-dimensional.

Yet despite these flaws, it was a book. A real book with a beginning, middle, and end. It flowed well and in parts was so emotionally moving Jasper had found himself tearing up.

And Morty had done this. In private, in secret. If not for the heart-attack, he probably would have eventually shown the manuscript to Jasper, maybe researched how to get published. Perhaps one day the two of them would have walked into a bookstore and seen The Stranger sitting on a shelf.

A lot of probably, maybe, and perhaps in that scenario, but it was nice to imagine that future, even if it could never happen.

Jasper reached out and gently ran his fingers down the screen then along the desk, heedless of the dust that coated his fingertips. He felt closer to Morty than he had since the funeral.

“Oh Morty,” Jasper said quietly to the empty room that didn’t feel so empty at the moment. “Even now, you can still surprise me.”