Read Online Where the Light Falls by Gretchen Shirm - Free Book Online

apartment that had been renovated, as though the owner had started the process but hadn’t followed through. Sometimes he had stood in the shower with the door closed; it was the only place he felt he had any privacy when Kirsten was also home. The sound of the stream of water hitting the recess around him had washed away the other noises of the apartment. He could almost pretend to himself he was alone.
    Their furniture was mismatched and everything they owned had been given to them or was on loan. On the dining table they had set up their computers, one at each end, and they had sat there together, working on assignments, one of them getting up occasionally to make a fresh pot of tea. Their bed was behind a curtain, clothes were flung across the room. Their wardrobe was an open rack. Everything they owned was exposed and neither of them could keep anything to themselves. It was no way to live with another person; he knew that now. But in their youth and inexperience, they had thought this was what sharing a life entailed. In those first six months of living together, he would have given everything he had to her, without understanding what the consequences of doing so would have been. Thinking of that space now,a warmth passed through him, a memory that felt claustrophobic; it was a place where emotions had started off pleasant but had soured.
    There was a day he remembered well, although the memory seemed faded, the colour drained from the scenes. He had been out all day, working in the studio on his major work, due at the end of that semester. Sometimes he slept in the studio for a few hours, woke and kept working, staying there through the night. He wasn’t sure where he got the motivation from and sometimes his interest in photography felt closer to an obsession.
    He had come home one afternoon around five. It was late in the year, the air was warm, familiar, with the sense that things were ending. The apartment was still when he opened the door. The air was suddenly cold and he heard a deep-throated grumble, the beginning of a storm. He saw a bowl and a mug in the kitchen from when Kirsten ate breakfast before she left for work that morning. He washed them under the tap. From their apartment, they could sometimes hear noise from the stadium in Moore Park and there must have been a football game on, because the surge of voices drifted towards him, a chorus of exaltations.
    He enjoyed those moments of solitude. Outside the traffic moved in bursts, the sound of it reaching him, the buses and trucks through his window like the groans and complaints of people he didn’t know, plaintive,full of sorrow and anger. The gruff exhale of a truck as it shifted down a gear. This was what he loved, this making sense of the world. When he was alone like this, the world could mutate and change; it could become what he imagined it to be.
    Fat voluptuous clouds scudded low in the sky. The shadows had become thin, disappearing slowly in anticipation of rain. An old skip sat on the side of the road. Someone had moved out of an apartment in their building and deposited the refuse of their life into the metal bin. There was a plastic doll with its arm missing, its hair teased out. He could have stood there forever at that window, from where he could see the world but it couldn’t touch him.
    He moved into the bedroom, where the room smelt of their bodies from the stale sheets. From the rack, he took a fresh shirt off a hanger. He had been wearing the same clothes for two days. That was when he noticed the shape on the bed. Kirsten was lying there. He moved around to her side of the bed and watched her for a moment.
    She was beautiful and still. The sheets followed the contour of her body. In her silence she was perfect. He found himself thinking what a fine photograph this would make: Kirsten lying in bed with the sheets wound around her. He thought of his camera in his bag in the lounge room. It was the moment he realised that he saw the