In Panels – III

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Read Part 1 here.

Read Part 2 here.

Part Three of Three: ‘What are we to them?’ he asked.

I have not read many love stories. I have been told that there are a few out there, the infamous ones telling love as the beginning of a tragedy, as if simple human connections had grand designs. They do not. Two people meet and believe that their lives spiral around each other to reach the same conclusions, not realizing that we are often on outbound trajectories—that in coming closer we set ourselves up to be whisked farther away. Margaret was on such an outbound spiral, our interaction more a feature of our ephemeral proximity than of a universal conspiracy. Love was not a tragedy: it was not much of a thing to be much of anything.

In Panels – II

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Read Part 1 here.

Part Two of Three: ‘Our story begins where this aisle ends’, he said.

If I were asked what happened in the following years, I would shrug and say, ‘Stuff’, squeezing a few decades in one word. Later that year, my Artist kept me aside and picked up better, more ambitious projects. I was reborn from my archives, waiting for the day I would be discarded for His next great creation. That never came. Towards the end of his life, He would say, ‘I just didn’t have it in me after Grinns; that one strip exhausted me.’ His death made him a one-hit wonder and put me firmly in the run for my own collected volume.

In Panels – I

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Aisle 23: Shelf 34 was long; in the three months I had crawled across it, nudged onwards by whispers, I had barely hoped to arrive, stop, and breathe. I entered and disappeared from the panels frantically like a traveler who was expected somewhere ages ago, and who, realizing they are late, had put the destination more to heart than the travel. Who, while they had rushed through a busy street, stumbling and tripping, had practised a million different excuses spoken a million different ways.