Wild Fiction

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Genevieve woke to the sound of snoring. She had become used to this. Her husband frequently snored when he had been drinking. He lay on his back with his mouth open and his arms spread across the bed. She gently eased herself off the bed, careful not to wake him. She pulled a T-shirt over her naked body and padded downstairs for her morning caffeine fix. With a large mug of steaming tea she returned to the landing and stood perfectly still, holding her breath. She could hear his rhythmic snoring coming from the bedroom. She pushed the door to the study open, and moved like a ballerina through the sea of papers that lay in neat little piles on the floor. A computer stood in the middle of his desk. She pressed the on/off switch and the machine started to hum as a row of LED lights lit up and flashed on. The cursor blinked in the middle of the screen after the word:
password:
She drummed her fingers on the desktop while she thought. It’ll be a name, a woman’s name if I know him. A woman who’s beautiful and prominent and always on TV and in the papers. A woman who... She typed in ‘cindy’. Incorrect, the computer responded. Genevieve drummed her fingers in front of the keyboard again. She tapped the keys that spelt out ‘pamela’. Incorrect, again. Then it came to her: ‘calista’, correct, the computer initiated the boot sequence. She loaded the file finder and performed a query on most recently accessed documents. There was only one that had been modified in the last three days; it was called Wild Fiction. She double clicked it and came up against the password barrier again. She entered guess after guess until frustration forced her to push the chair away from the desk and stand up. She interlocked her fingers and stretched them as high above her head as she could, standing on her toes as she did so. She walked over to his bookshelf and stared at the titles. He had not mentioned anything about Wild Fiction to her. She thought he was revising his short story collection. She drummed her fingers on the edge of the bookshelf before returning to the desk to try some more passwords. It was futile and she closed down the computer muttering obscenities at it. She flicked through the papers that had been in front of the computer before replacing them as they had been. They were printouts from the Internet describing the conditions inside prison. She tiptoed through the piles of papers on the floor examining the first few sheets of each pile when her attention was drawn to the sound of a car on the gravel in their front drive.
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