short story

The wind animated everything that afternoon. No thing was without life. The trees swayed and spoke, fallen leaves scurried close to the ground like rodents and plastic bags flew with the battered sparrows. Even the gravestones were bullied to attention by the gusts.
The only dead article in the whole cemetery was an item even the wind couldn’t touch—a non-corporeal, invisible, immaterial item—a relationship.

Two figures walked slowly between the stones, wrapped tightly in wool then cotton then nylon to keep out jealous fingers of icy air. There was nothing to say. Even if there had been, the wind would have stolen it as the words passed their lips. Any meaningful commentary would have been lost to the landscape.
But they both knew. That was all.
They parted wordlessly; each knowing where their paths would diverge, neither knowing where the other was headed.
The man turned at the edge of the road to watch his last two years, three months and fifteen days walk away. Her scarf came undone and attempted an escape but was pinned by her collar. Its free end struggled vainly, mixing its bright color with the dull brown of her hair. Up close, he knew, these locks held a rainbow of reds and blonds and golds and even some silver but, from far away, this remarkable head of hair was entirely unexceptional, especially when juxtaposed with the brilliant orange of the fabric. Her hands reached up and tamed the jumble, pulling the scarf back into place, fastening the struggling mess to her head.
She never looked back, just disappeared into the growing dusk.