Free The Fictional Man by Al Ewing

of your old CDs in it. And no offence, but I’m not having your shit taking up space in my life. I figured I’d give you a chance to take them off my hands – I’m home all Wednesday.”
    Niles thought. “I’ve got a therapy appointment on Wednesday.”
    “What, for the whole day? Look, I’m not paying postage. Either you come get them or they go to the Goodwill. Actually, it’s not like anyone uses CDs any more, I’ll probably just throw them away –”
    “Don’t be hasty,” Niles said hurriedly, “I could import them onto my laptop. It might save me some money on iTunes. Which albums are they? Are you sure they’re mine?”
    He heard the sound of cardboard being dragged across carpet, and then the click of plastic on plastic as she sorted through them. “Let’s see... Gustav Holst, that’s yours. Mike And The Mechanics, Dire Straits, U2... Josie And The Pussycats, that’s definitely yours... Terrordance. ..”
    Niles winced again. “That’s not mine –”
    “I’ve got Purple Rain here, and that’s absolutely one of yours. Your music taste was frozen in ice with the woolly mammoths.”
    “Not Terrordance, though.” Niles rubbed his temples. “I mean, God. Terrordance. Where did that come from?”
    There was a brief pause. “I have no idea,” Iyla said, although from the sound of it she probably did. Some impulse buy she now regretted. “That goes to the Goodwill, I guess.”
    “If they’ll take it.” Niles sighed. “All right, might as well go through the lot. I’ll stop you if there’s anything I don’t want.” He leaned back on the couch, staring at the frozen image of Joi Lansing, caught in mid-writhe, listening to Iyla reel off a short list of albums he remembered buying, most, if not all, from the time before he’d met her. He found himself wondering if this particular box had ever been unpacked during their time together. Maybe it was a metaphor for their relationship – although if it was, it was a metaphor that included him buying Terrordance on CD, and that wasn’t a metaphor he was quite prepared to accept. “Hold on,” he said suddenly. “What was that last one?”
    Iyla sighed. “The Donnie Darko soundtrack. That’s definitely yours, it’s all ’eighties music.”
    Niles shook his head, sitting up straight. “No, I remember you buying that. We’d just gone to see the film – you remember, it was 2001, we were still living in San Francisco –”
    Iyla scoffed. “I hated that film.”
    “You only hate it now because you saw the Director’s Cut. When you saw it in the cinema you thought it was great. And you loved the music, you thought that was the best part –”
    “Where are you getting this from?” Iyla sounded incredulous. Did she really not remember?
    “After the showing,” Niles said, surprised at the urgency that had crept into his voice, “we headed down to that restaurant you loved, the Italian one, and we walked because it was all downhill and on the way there was a Best Buy, and – and you’d been talking about the soundtrack, about how great those old Tears For Fears songs were and how they felt really fresh in a lot of ways and you wanted to hear more of them, and we passed a Best Buy and you just went right in and bought the album. I remember it. You actually jumped up and down when you found it, you had this big smile, your eyes were shining –”
    “Okay, okay,” Iyla said down the line, sounding a little disturbed. “It’s not yours. I’ll give it to the Goodwill.”
    “And afterwards, in the restaurant, you kept taking it out and looking at the track listing, and you were in such a good mood –” Niles couldn’t seem to stop himself talking. “You were in such a good mood because of the film, and, and because you’d just had a job offer in LA for twice the salary you were on, enough for us to get a really nice apartment, and... I remember the way you said us, like it was a given, not like... like you were asking if there