In Walks These Three Girls

Meeting Women

scurtin2 — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 05:15:23 +0000

There is something about you.

I thought I would just come over and say Hello.

I don’t know.

I can’t say exactly.

You have a sadness about you that is surprisingly attractive.

You remind me of Kermit the Frog.

Yes.

I have a thing for male gendered puppets from my childhood.

Can I buy you a drink?

I’m pretty sure Kermit drank.

You’re from Italy?

Great country.

I have been.

Oh all over.

Rome. Florence. Sorrento.

Stayed in hostels mostly.

Funny story actually.

I went with a buddy of mine.

Poor guy brought something itchy and red back with him.

You know what I mean?

He had a fondness for the Venetian women.

Where did you say you were from?

Venice.

Well, like I said.

The women are beautiful.

What do I do for a living?

I recite memorable movie quotes:

[Australian accent]

“That’s not a knife”

[pantomime pulling knife from sheath]

“That’s a knife.”

No I don’t really have a knife.

I recite movie quotes for a living.

How could I afford a knife?

That’s true.

There are good deals on the home shopping network.

You have a knife.

That’s good.

Antique Lamps

scurtin2 — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:15:04 +0000

I worked at a lamp shop off Fullerton and Southport in Chicago, trafficked mostly by college student s and the princessly stay-at-home mothers of Lincoln Park. We didn’t do a lot of business, creating an atmosphere that afforded me the luxury of reading all day. I read mostly shit, genre fiction—courtroom dramas, and mysteries. I’d throw some horror into the mix or the occasional epic Sci-Fi novel that had a half dozen prequels and sequels that I was never going to read.

The lamps were antiquish I suppose. The definition is particularly loose these days. To me an antique is something that is one hundred years old or older at the time of purchase. Suggesting that an object made in the 1950’s, such as most of the lamps we sold, would not be antiques. Yet, there the word was on the sign outside of the store: Antique Lamps.

Davit, my boss, was a typical Armenian with salt and pepper hair everywhere: his knuckles, arms, and chest—which he showed off unabashedly in half buttoned linen shirts. He was sixty or so and wore a lot of gold jewelry, particularly rings (a thing I don’t necessarily understand on men) and a large gaudy Rolex. His face, always smooth, was tempered and slightly effete with heart shape cheek bones that were drastically offset by bushy eyebrows he kept hid with designer sunglasses. He’d pop in twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. He’d always ask me the same question.

“Mark,” he’d say. “How many lamps have we sold today?”

I’d lie, “I just sold one ten minutes ago.”

“Good. That is very good. I will be back to lock up.” Then he’d leave for the day and I’d engross myself in a plot involving a battered wife, dead daughter, and a husband on trial proclaiming his innocence, only to find it was not the husband at all, but his own father and wife conspiring against him so as they could be free to love each other. All it took was some fancy footwork from an ambitious young lawyer to bring justice to the forefront. Sure he had to bend some rules, possibly break some laws, to get there but he did it. Has he fallen from grace because of his ruthless pursuit of justice? Will each victory thereafter contain the bittersweet taste of ethical compromise? Find out in the next fifteen books.

For the next six hour s or so I would sit and read. I’d stand up and walk around when some customers entered, point out some lamps I think they would enjoy, something kitschy for the eccentric moms: a table lamp with a bright red floral pattern on white porcelain. If they didn’t bite, I’d move to the polar opposite, something pricier and more traditional, maybe some stained glass on brass base, a Wilkinson or a Miller. For the college hipsters, I’d point out something mid-century: a bulbous woven pattern in aqua, cheap, something they could find in their grandma’s basement or attic if they rummaged around. I’d watch them as they’d leave, happily marching off across the street to Walgreens to buy energy efficient light bulbs.

Davit would come back at five. He’d smell pleasantly of cigars and vodka, like someone’s grandfather. But I didn’t know if he had kids, or if his hypothetical kids had kids. “Good boy, Mark” he’d say. “You can go home now. I will lock up.” He’d head into the backroom, presumably to take an inventory. I sometimes imagined he met his mistress (if he had one) there, having a romp in the backroom and something funny would happen while he was trying to give it to her, like him throwing out his back or having a heart attack where he’d have to be carted off in an ambulance, a confused mistress, dressed only in Davit’s linen shirt, wondering how she was going to prevent the wife from finding out about this one.

After work, I’d walk the two blocks to Racine and then to my shitty garden apartment on Wrightwood, which was perpetually engrossed in the dirt that blew of the sidewalk straight through my window screens and on to all that I owned.

Shannon would come home a couple hours later from her job as a copywriter. A job I despised almost as much as I despised her for performing it. Shannon was a brunette with a petite, angular nose and large, green eyes that wandered around in her skull when she didn’t agree with you. She worked for a company that specialized in oral hygiene, requiring her to manipulate language in order to manufacture a need for one of the two hundred and fifty toothpastes on the market that are all made of the same junk.

At this point I could tell we were on the rocks because I was frequently diagnosing her with a multitude of mental illnesses. Some days she was a functioning sociopath with delusions of grandeur, others an agoraphobic with post traumatic stress flare ups. But more often than not she was manic depressive with a French cinematic compulsivity. During the upswings , she was gay and inspiring. She would go to the grocery store and come back with fresh fruit, flowers, brie, a baguette, and a bottle of Bordeaux. In a downswing she was aloof. She slept whenever she could and drank and smoke when she was awake. She listened to obscure jazz and wrote epic poems in which she criticized the sham of happiness that veiled the world.

I took advantage of her during in the upswings in the most euphemistic and pejorative sense of the phrase. I like sex as much as the next person, and if her hysteria lined up with weekend I could get her to fuck all day. I called it Wolf Sex to my friends. Wolves, I read one time, eat as much as they can in one sitting, not knowing when they’re going to eat again. I applied the same practice to having sex with Shannon.

She came home one night in the middle of a downswing. I was making dinner, one of the three variations of chicken breasts, rice, and salad that I knew how to make. A sigh left her lips when she locked the door, triggering a teeth gritting contempt while I sautéed mushrooms. She dropped her briefcase in the hallway and I could hear her taking off her shoes, groaning. She dropped her keys on the glass table and sloughed her jacket off and threw it on the couch.

Neither of us were saying Hello. She came into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. I was already on my second and waiting for her to unload into me about something—how I forgot to use the squeegee on the shower doors again, or how she found porn urls on in her computer history. The wine was a chardonnay and I focused in on how much I liked it: A rich full bodied wine with heavy oak notes and a buttery finish that coats the tongue, pairs well with chicken and sautéed mushrooms.

“Are you going to have enough to pay your half of the rent this month?”

“I will,” I said.

“Good.”

She stood behind me as she said this, looking over my shoulder. The engagement ring I had given a couple of months back clinked against the stem of her wine glass. It was an inheritance, my grandmother to my mother and then my mother to me when I told her I wanted to ask Shannon to marry me. We had broken up once already and the thought of her being with another man sickened me to such a degree that I thought I could tolerate her unhappiness and simultaneously bear my own sadness (a not so rare side effect of under achievement).

“Dinner is almost ready,” I said.

“I had a late lunch.” She walked back toward the living room, plopped down in front of the couch, and turned on the television. She watched utter shit but I rarely brought it up, avoiding any kind of potential launch into a discussion of the crap books I read. Reality television has taken, in my opinion, a disastrous turn, not just for itself but for mankind as well.

I sometimes imagine the inhabitants of Pompeii putting on some elaborate reality-theatre production. The contestant’s blind fold is removed only to find that he is in a small room with stuccoed walls. A five-hundred pound, raging mad bull snorts in the corner. His blind fold is being removed with a long stick. A rope hangs from a hole in the ceiling in the center of the room. The man, in his twenties and reasonably fit, must climb out of to survive. He agreed to do this for fifty gold pieces. An audience watches through barred windows. What’s that rumbling in the distance? Smoke? Why is that mountain shaking? Liquid fire? Seventeen-hundred years later and everyone is a fucking artifact, and these 18^th century archeologists are scratching their wigged domes trying to figure out what the remains of a bull are doing in the same room as a man with a hole in the ceiling.

I ate dinner standing over the kitchen counter, finished the wine, and opened another bottle. She curled up on the couch, wrapping herself in her coat. She dozed as the sun set through our windows. The only sun we got all day. I watched people’s shins flanked by their retrievers and pugs shuffle past. The television bleeped the swears of beautiful late twenty -year-old and some thirty-year- old men and women, border line sociopaths, getting drunk in Mexico and screaming at each other. Others, gropingly touched one another, and two women made out. Hung over in the morning, they got to compete against each other for ten thousand dollars.

I sat in the chair in the living room. Not even night yet and my company was already shunned. What kind of an adult sleeps fully clothed using a jacket as a blanket? A needy self-obsessed one pouting in some sad childhood she built for herself out of wobbly popsicle sticks glued together with grief. The fan of her nostrils annoyed me. The way she adjusted to her back and cracked her toes simultaneously. She became genderless, hardening my contempt. She was a thing free of social constraints that I could throw my disdain on from a more objective cliff. Her frailty became a calculated scheme to me, a needy ploy for attention. Unable to tell me that she wanted me to love her more; she set to turning the screws.

I wanted to read, throw myself into some predictable plot where I knew who the killer was from page ten, or where the money was going to be found on page two-thirteen. I grabbed my bag from the bedroom and searched through it. My book wasn’t in it. I checked again, emptying everything onto the floor. It wasn’t there. I looked for it in the doorway where I sometimes left it on a small shelving unit to untie my shoes. I looked under the couch, didn’t give a damn if I woke her up. I wanted her to see this. My dismay. My crisis. I knocked her keys off the table to wake her.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for my book. Have you seen it?” I said, kneeling next to her.

“What? No.“

“Why are you sleeping?”

“I’m tired. Work sucked.”

“Sucked.” I whispered.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Maybe you left it at work?”

“Go back to sleep.” I said.

She turned from me and faced the couch. She didn’t cry and I put on my shoes and left. An ambulance passed when I got out to the sidewalk, no siren, just its lights flashing wildly. Why we chose to live in the Lincoln Park still eludes me. We couldn’t afford it, the apartment, the restaurants, the nightlife. College was over for me. We didn’t get invited to anything. Davit was the only person I worked with and other than sharing a few casual conversations we were not friends. Shannon, even if she did get invited to a party by a co-worker, wouldn’t tell me about it until weeks had gone by. Maybe she would have been happier if we moved further north, or west into the suburbs, saved some money and took a vacation.

The streetlights washed everything in a soft orange glow. I stared at my feet, limiting myself to one and a half steps per sidewalk square. It was fall and the bar on the corner was packed, and the women looked attractive in their tight blank pants and turtlenecks. The men were clean shaven and their hair looked wet, like a fucking shaving razor commercial. A film of wine coated my teeth. It was a safe neighborhood. Leaves covered the ground smelling sweetly of rotting apples. That is why we stayed there.

Fullerton was lit up with neon lights from gas stations and smelled like grease and refried beans from the late night burrito places. People stepped out of cabs and into bars, and people left bars and stepped into cabs. Up ahead, the regular bums loitered outside the Walgreens waiting to ask for change from the people coming out from the ATM’s. My favorite, who I had given the obvious epithet—Charlie “The Angry Bum” Brown—was in stellar form berating a man who had just exited the store.

“No money. Mother fucker, I know you have money I just watched you go to the cash machine.” His breath loped out of his mouth and his eyes went squint and disappeared. He rocked from foot to foot like a man with sore feet.

“Sorry, man.”

“Fuck you.” He pointed at the man and the change in his McDonald’s cup jingled.

The bum eyed me as I approached. I stopped in front of him and dug all the loose change I had from my pocket.

“Thank you. Thank you, my brother. God bless.”

“No problem.” I felt superior. I had less to give and I gave it. I crossed the street to the lamp store. The light to the sign was still on and I thought Davit must have forgotten to turn it off. Outside the store I took the keys from my pocket. A light popped on in the shop and then off. The glare from the Walgreens sign blocked my view into the shop. A light popped on again and then off. I cupped my hands around my eyes and butted myself against the glass. Davit was still in the store.

He stood in one of the aisles with the flat-cart we used to unload the truck when we got deliveries. On the cart sat an industrial size carton of light bulbs. In the dark he moved from lamp to lamp, turned it on and then turned it off. When he found a lamp that didn’t turn on, a smile would appear on his face and he would take a light bulb out of the package and hold it with his left hand, simultaneously unscrewing the burnt out bulb with his right. He’d replace the bulb and then with a permanent marker he’d draw a small “x” on the bad one and move on until he found another burnt bulb and repeat the process with the same happy countenance he held on the previous lamp. His lips moved as he replaced the bulbs, and it was only after sometime watching him, that I realized he was whispering to the lamps, telling each one what he liked about it, or maybe something about himself or what had happened to him that day.

I knocked on the window. Davit turned on the lamp, the bulb he just replaced. He looked out. I waved at him. He walked over to the door, undid the locks, and opened it. The chimes sounded.

“Mark. You have come for your book?”

“Yes. Did you find it?”

“It’s on the register.”

“I’m glad you’re here. I’m not sure I would have remembered the password to the alarm.”

“It is easy. It is just the address. Maybe too easy. I was thinking of changing it.”

I walked to the register. My book sat next to it, a slick black cover with a bold red font set in a relief. The author’s name was larger than the title. My bookmark, one of Davit’s business cards, sat next to it. I would have to re-read some pages to figure out where I left off. Davit leaned over the flat-cart counting the number of good bulbs he had left. His rings and watch sat on the cart next to the bulbs. He put the rings back on one at a time and then slid his watch onto his wrist.

“How many Armenians does it take to screw in a light bulb?” I regretted it instantly when I said it. The words hung dully in the air like the fading of some obnoxious and ill-timed gong.

Davit smiled slowly as he pushed the cart towards the backroom. “Fortunately only one. I do not think I could afford another.” His face was slack and tired, but not unhappy, as he crept past me. With only a single lamp lit, the rest of the lamps cast awkward shadows on us, creating something akin to the opposite of camouflage where we picked each other out easily in the dimness.

Building a Fire

scurtin2 — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:55:56 +0000

Broken picture frames

used for kindling,

this house is not the same

in winter when,

against the cold,

the fine things

grow dull and the tall

things fall supine.

A book of matches

from a titty bar ages ago

can still make fire.

The neighbor watches us,

inside our jars,

throwing ourselves against the glass

to see what exactly this

goop inside us

looks like.

I Hope to Feel it When You Die

scurtin2 — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:47:58 +0000

If you die before me, I will feel it;

I hope not in some new-age, transcendental

horseshit way: your soul passing through my body like

electricity, or in some haunting macabre way: the image of a pigeon’s

skeleton coming to mind.

I would rather stub my toe, or shit my pants,

old and crotchety, in the warmth of my old house

and carry on with the rest of my day, trying to convince myself

that I didn’t know you had just died while I rub on ICY-HOT or cut back

on my daily fiber.

But that is not going to be the way is it?

Death is not the time for spite or vulgarity.

Emotion is the route

you will take.

It will be like the time, pleasantly high,

I stood on the El platform, staring at a full moon,

only to find it wasn’t the moon at all,

but the reflection

of a streetlight in an apartment building’s window

and I thought of you and thought of you but you

had not died.

Better

scurtin2 — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:24:45 +0000

John from Oklahoma goes Bankrupt. Pat apologizes for his misfortune. Michael thinks it would be funny if Sajack has a little button he presses like a bank alarm when someone is pushing their luck; they know the answer to the puzzle but keep guessing consonants to rack up more dough. Susan from Baton Rouge is up next. She chants “Big money” and claps her hands. She has lipstick shellacked all over her mug and one of those hairdos from the 80‘s with built in buttresses. The 80’s must be the decade she had her first child, Michael thinks, robbing her of her youth, now she’s stuck there, stagnant, submerged in a swamp of primary colors, Aqua Net, banana clips, and rayon. Michael is glad he and Michelle waited to have children.

The panties bulge in Michael’s pocket, the faintest outline of a leg hole highlighted by the tautness of his khakis. Could he call them panties? He knew women didn’t call them panties unless they were trying to be seductive. But girls might call them panties. From now on he’d carry them in his back pocket like a handkerchief.

He found the panties in the forest preserve during his walk. He thought it was a piece of trash, he told himself. He’s still telling himself. But he knows it’s a lie. He’s never picked up trash on his walks before and kept it. There’s so much of it out there, random sections of last year’s newspapers, tattered tennis shoes, sun-faded soda cans. He’d picked these things up sometimes to approximate their length of decay, like checking the dates on a handful of change, but then place them back down where he found them. “Tuesday” they said, scattered in all different directions in a tiny, green font. It is Tuesday. Maybe she wore them on the corresponding day?

She was playing truth or dare, he assumed. Her and her friends, other girls her age, ten or eleven, they came out here by the pond to smoke the butts of their fathers’ cigarettes and meet some boys. Maybe his son? But the boys never showed and they decided to entertain themselves.

Having nothing to confess, she chose dare. They dared her to take off her clothes and swim in the pond for one minute, with the caveat that she must swim to the bottom. She agreed. The other two watched her undress. They giggled as she covered her burgeoning breasts with one arm and struggled to remove her shorts with the other. They called her mosquito bites.

Heat lines caressed her soft body as she treaded into the lake, scattering flies from the surface. She dove down deep, eyes shut, and let the cold consume her body, kicking her legs until she felt her hand plunge into the mud of the lakebed. While she was underwater they hid her underwear in some dry brush off the path. They smiled when she returned to the shore. She rummaged abashedly through her socks and shirt, turning her shorts inside out but quickly calmed herself. Refusing to become frantic and give them any type satisfaction, she put her clothes back on and walked home wet and underwear-less. This is what he thinks happened

Susan spins the wheel with an exhaustive grunt. $500, guesses an L, a rectangle lights up. It’s a Before and After. E L _ _ _ _ T N E _ _ O _ STON. Susan laughs a little, “I’d like to solve the puzzle she says. Eli Whitney Houston, she shouts out in a heavy staccato, shaking her jowls. The crowd claps and laughs a little. Pat indulges the impulse to explain to the audience in T.V. Land who Eli Whitney is, skirting the obvious jokes about Whitney Houston, which is a joke in and of itself, saying only “And Whitney Houston was, among other things, a talented singer.” the audience laughs and coos at Pat’s inappropriateness.

“Why are we watching this?” Michaels asks his son. “What’d you do today?”

“I like it. It’s helping my language skills. I think.”

A commercial for Tide is on that his son, for some unknown reason, is being sucked in to: Tide gets the stains that other stains leave behind. “So what did you to today?” he asks again. “Do I need to turn this off? I’m trying to have a conversation with you. You don’t do your laundry anyway.”

“I played Wii baseball at Tony’s and then we went and played real baseball at the school. I do my laundry sometimes.”

“Ah, I see. Any girls around?” She’s a brunette, he thinks. There were no stray hairs in the underwear. But in his head he sees a brunette.

“What?” his son asks.

His wife comes up behind the couch, resting a hand on each one of their shoulders. “I hate to interrupt this male bonding, but dinner is ready.” She has been cooking since she recovered, something new every night. She couldn’t bear the thought of smoking a pack or drinking dozens of cups of coffee a day. They both made her jittery she told him.

For the past month and a half dinner has been ready between six thirty and seven. They eat at the table no exceptions, and often in a silence that seems to seep out from the carpeting of the dining room. He’d always wished for some kind of consistency from her, a point where she’d stop letting him down. He has that now, but it’s not right. He feels a flattening indifference towards her now, the color gray comes to mind. He wished equally to reach a point in himself where his expectations for her would plummet, bottom out, but she surpasses them now with a limited search of approval from him, and he finds this annoying.

“I got this one from Emeril,” she says as Michael and his son get up from the sofa. “I just have to dress the salad and we’ll be ready to eat.”

“That salad, always wandering about without any clothes on,” Michael says, flashing a cheesy smile.

She laughs but it’s a different laugh than before, light and reedy. She use to laugh hard and full when he made corny jokes—stabs at the PG, fifties culture that their parents had tried to emulate with staggering failure. They used to make fun of it together, going to church in your Sunday best, family Christmas cards, prayers before bed, missionary sex. She wants him to make that joke earnestly now. She wishes that is dirtiest joke he ever told. He knows.

“Sam, can you set the table?” she asks their son.

“Can we eat in here? I’m watching Wheel of Fortune.”

“I’d rather we didn’t.”

“Fine,” he says in an elongated sulk.

“How about we eat at the table but leave the T. V. on?” Michael says. “Compromise, right?”

“I’m Okay with that. As long as you’re okay with saying Grace, Mike?”

“I can do that,” Michael says.

She gets the recipes off the Food Network website, or from Chuck, her sponsor, a fifty something year old ex-chef that she met at a meeting. Michael went to a meeting with her once, about three months back and met Chuck. It was in a small church next to a Walgreen’s in the downtown area of the small suburb they live in. The meeting was held in a classroom clearly designated for catechism. Popsicle stick crosses lined the walls, macraméd at their cruxes with brightly colored yarn. The room was hot and thirty or so laminate wooden desks faced a podium with a dry erase board behind it. No one was smoking but it still smelled like cigarettes, and evergreen and alcohol from the floor polish, a cruel test of faith for the patrons Michael thought.

Chuck looked the way most recovering alcoholics looked, like he’d seen his fair share of shit he’d never intended on seeing and then he’d seen a little more. He had a gray beard and heavy crow’s feet deep enough to fill with cement. He wore an un-tucked flannel and a pair of jeans. They shook hands. Chuck hugged Michelle, leaving his chapped hand on her hip after their embrace for a spell, touching the bare skin that peeked out between her shirt and skirt. He looked into her eyes and told her that she was going to make it, that he had a good feeling about her. Then he told Michael he was wondering when he was going to get to meet him.

“She didn’t want me to come to the earlier ones,” Michael told him, which was the truth. She told him she needed to do this by herself. This was partly true, but the real reason was, and Michael knew, that she didn’t want him to talk her out of getting help. He would’ve too. He’d wanted her to get help, but that night, looking around at all those long faces. Those people rocking in the miniature aluminum chairs with their jackets and clothes from a decade ago, with their pock marked skin, warming their cracked hands around Styrofoam cups. Some even wore sweatpants to the meeting–outside of the house. She was different from them, better. She just needed to be more careful. She didn’t need to do this. He could help her moderate herself.

He listened to their spiels, an Academy Awards ceremony of the Previously Inebriated. He flipped through a pamphlet mindlessly while they talked. The dry erase board filled up with recovery slogans: Stay sober one day at a time, Believe in a higher power, Take responsibility for your life and provided an amusing backdrop for their primarily self-indulgent tales. Their stories highlighted their most spectacular failures and shortcomings-the worst of which sounded like a made for T. V. movie, a fifth of whisky and a few beers, some driving, killed a family; he was twenty two. He actually shook while he told it. Eventually the pit orchestra would start to play in the form of squeaky chairs, Styrofoam cups being chewed apart, and, Michael’s personal favorite, interludes in the forms of sighs–a strange primeval exhalation of pride by some of the addicts in their ability to tolerate their own sufferings, which they believed were significantly worse than the speakers, sighs that said “Problems. He thinks those are problems.” After the orchestra started, the speaker thanked the notion of God that they believed in, unanimously a New Testament God that forgives transgressions as wide a trenches.

Michelle stood up last to voice her grievances against herself like he knew she was going to. She wouldn’t have wanted him to come otherwise. She smoothed her skirt and she walked up to the podium and pulled her shirt down slightly, covering up her bare hips. She looked calm shoulders back, hands swinging at her side, like she were walking around the house. Her hair swashed against the middle of her back. Michael thought it looked rehearsed that she had probably given her sob story already some other night when he wasn’t there, and now this one was solely for his benefit. This was going to be the re-enactment, complete with horrible body acting–wide gesticulations and variations on crunched up faces, representing anger, fear, and shame. Her monologue was going to be too on the nose, forced, and contrived. She wouldn’t single him out but the camera man would get a tight shot of his crunched up face—fear. She started up, “My name is Michelle, and I’m an alcoholic.”

Sam sets the table. A bouquet of fake flowers sits in the middle, dustless, real looking from a distance. She must clean them during the day, he thinks. Michelle brings out the food, salad, mashed potatoes, and a pork loin roast. She read somewhere that it’s healthy to have a single portion of a carbohydrate, vegetable, and protein per meal. But the lack of another carb often leaves Michael hungry. They pass the dishes around and plate their own food. Michelle nods at Michael to say Grace. A commercial for some allergy medication is mumbling side effects in the living room, Dry Mouth, Nausea, Dizziness, Vomiting……

Michael clasps his hands and hangs his head toward his plate. “Good Lord, Bless these sinners as they eat their dinners.”

“Kind of short?” she says.

“And sweet. Let’s eat. Oh my, I can’t stop. I might pop.” Sam laughs at his father, as Michael anticipated.

“So long as you included yourself in that,” she says.

“Of course I did.” Sam has already cut into his food and his laughter has diffused Michelle’s frustration momentarily. Michael feels slightly guilty for having used Sam against his wife and knows he will have to apologize to Michelle later for his half hearted grace.

Susan from Baton Rouge manages to solve one more puzzle, a Thing, Pencil, winning a vacation to Thailand and picking up something called a Wild Card that will allow her to guess another consonant should she make it to the Bonus Round. Easy, Michael thinks, Wheel of Fortune is just giving stuff away these days. The pork loin is tender and is coated in a flavorful rosemary glaze. He will tell her that he liked dinner very much after he apologizes, or maybe he should thank Emeril?

The next puzzle is an Occupation. It’s eight letters long. Diane from Washington D. C. is up but she’s been a phantom the whole game. Crescents of sweat have soaked the armpits of her red blouse. She’s not in the running. She spins $300, guesses an R. The last letter of the word lights up and Vanna gives it a tap and it lights up. A silly bell rings and Pat says it’s time for him to give the wheel a final spin. “Consonants worth $1200. Vowels worth nothing,” he says

“So, did you guys play with any girls today?” Rick, the chubby kid with the baby face that Sam hangs out with has a sister, he remembers.

“Nope.” Diane guesses an M. There are no M’s. John from Oklahoma is up. He guesses an L. It’s the second letter. He has few seconds to put together a guess. He’s in the running. If he can win this, he can nudge himself into the bonus round over Susan. The buzzer sounds. Susan is up. She guesses a T. It’s the fourth letter. Vanna makes her way over, gives it a touch and it pops up. _L_T_ _ _ R . Susan is stumped and next up is Diane from Washington. She guesses and E. There are two in the puzzle. _ L E T _ _ E R. She has a few seconds of confusion and then clarity registers on her face. “Fletcher,” she guesses. She’s right.

“Doesn’t Rick have an older sister?” He thinks she’s tall for her age. She must give her mother hell with a personality like that.

“What’s a Fletcher?”

“An arrow maker. Rick has an older sister, right?” Pat is making the rounds. He thanks John, congratulates him on his $15,000 showing, and wishes him the best with his new wife.

“Do people still make arrows?” Sam says.

“I bet most are made by machines, but some people probably still make arrows,” Michelle says. Diane’s pits are soaked. She lost but she’s still smiling like the corners of her mouth are sutured to her gums.

“Diane,” Pat says. “Thanks for coming on. Sometimes that Wheel just prevents people from getting started.” She says she still had fun and that’s all that matters.

“Sam. I’m asking you a question?”

“Geez. What?”

“Rick has a sister. Does she play with you guys?” Michael says.

“Sometimes. We asked her if she wanted to play baseball but she was doing something else.” Pat has his arm around Susan. She’s looking up at him, batting her turquoise eye shadow. Pat’s trying to keep her hair out his face. “$40,000 already, including a trip to Thailand. We’ll see what else we can give you when we get back. Stick around.”

“What was she doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Michael, let him watch the show.”

“It’s a commercial. She’s older than him, right?”

Sam’s attention is on the television. He watches a commercial for Dominos where it’s the father’s night to make dinner.

“Sam?” The T. V. mother’s face twists in anxiety as she walks into the door. But lo and behold, dad called Dominos and there’s an awesome spread of bread sticks, two liters of soda, and two different kinds of pizza. Everyone, including mom, is impressed by Dad’s ingenuity.

“Yeah, she’s older, a year.” He doesn’t look away from the T.V. pushing forkfuls of salad into the side of his mouth. He spills shredded carrots onto his lap but he doesn’t seem to care.

“Is she pretty?”

“Mike, leave him alone.”

“What? I’m just trying to gauge his interest. It’s about that time, you know?”

It’s the Bonus Round. Vanna flashes her pearly whites and stands at an awkward slant with her far leg tucked behind her near one. They switch cameras to Pat and Susan, who has, during the commercial break, developed red blotches that run the length of her neck. She’s looking down at the tile floor with Pat’s arm around hers trying to find her mark.

“He doesn’t need to be interested in girls at this age yet.”

Pat tells her to give the glittery miniature wheel a spin and then pick the envelope that the tab stopped on. She hands it over and Pat steers her to her mark on the other side of the wheel. She’s looking at her feet again. The puzzle is a Thing, eight letters long. Pat gives her R S T L N E. The first and last two rectangles light up and Vanna gives it a touch. All three are L‘s . “L,” she says, “for Louisana,” adding that they’ve been through a lot recently and that the state is still recovering. Pat reflects on the hurricane as a terrible event, sending his condolences to all the victims that were affected. But chances are Pat didn’t donate any money and as sure as shit if Susan wins she’s not donating her winnings to a relief fund. She’ll probably just funnel it back into cigarettes and scratch off lottery tickets.

“He doesn’t need to be but he probably is. Sam is she pretty?” Pat is telling Susan to pick four constants (because of the Wild Card) and a vowel,

“M H F. . . .”

“Damnit, Sam, are you listening?”

“Can you shut up? I’m trying to watch this.”

“Shut up? That’s it. Say goodbye to Wheel of Fortune, Sam.” Michael stands up and crosses the family room to the television. Sam follows behind him. Susan has picked up an F as the fifth letter and an I as the sixth, making the puzzle L _ _ _ F I L L. Michael shields the television with his body. The answer is Landfill, he knows.

“Let me see,” Sam says. Michael pushes the power button on the set. The screen turns black.

“No. You’re grounded. Go to your room.”

“Michael.” Michelle says. She’s standing now, clutching her napkin.

“Michelle. Stay out of this.”

“Sam go to your room.” Sam’s face is red and tears are forming on the rim of his eyelids. He turns towards the staircase to make his way upstairs. Michael walks a couple steps away from the television set and then catches a glimpse of Sam darting back toward the television. The slap lands flush in conjunction with the pop of the mechanism that engages the T. V. Sam is stunned. The credits roll. Pat is shaking hands with the family as they pile into a blue Mazda. They won the car. Sam is stunned and crying. Michael is sorry but he’s taken this too far to go back.

“I told you to go to your room.”

“Sam, go to your room,” Michelle says. She is the good guy now, he knows. She clears the table calmly.

Sam runs upstairs to his room, stamping his feet as hard as he can on the wooden stairs. He slams the door and the faint fluttering of the poster he keeps on the back of his door can be heard.

The credits are still rolling and Pat and Vanna are making jokes about where they will be headed next week. Pat is wearing a ten gallon hat and complaining about an ache in his neck. “Deep in the heart of Texas,” they sing, followed by clapping. The news is on next.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Michelle says.

“I had a reason, Michelle. My life hasn’t been filled with things I shouldn’t have done.”

“Whatever.” She says. She brings the remaining dishes into the kitchen and fills the sink with water. Michael sits on the couch to watch the news. The faint undertones of Sam’s cries can be heard from upstairs. He’ll stop soon Michael thinks. He’s not that upset. Kids forgive. I just scared him. I’ll apologize tomorrow. Tonight to Michelle, tomorrow to Sam.

The news is depressing fires and automobile accidents and Michael is tuning much of it out with the same ease that the newscasters are delivering it.

“A suburban girl was raped today in broad daylight,” the newscaster says. His hair is nicely quaffed and his suit pinstriped. “More about that when we come back.”

Michael in all his self-proclaimed practicality hadn’t considered this, the possibility of rape. He’s worried now. Before, it was a novelty. He wanted simply to know, not even to know, just to see the girl who belonged to the panties, to the see the face of a girl that he might’ve loved if he was his son. But this has a gravity he’s not prepared for. Maybe she was hurt, forced to do things in a spot that he’d cherished for his walks, his solitude. How much later did he come after this man was there? He could have saved her and as he thinks about this he’s killing the man.

He’s kicking his face until it doesn’t feel like face anymore, until his jaw breaks and his cheeks deflate. Then he turns it off just as easily as he turned it on, holding out his hand to this girl with her legs crossed and her panties around her knees, crying, and lying in a patch of saw grass. He’d tell her to pull her panties up. He wouldn’t even touch them and then he’d pick her up like a bride and let her wrap her fair arms around his neck and bury her face in his chest and he’d take her home. Her panties would still be hers and he wouldn’t have slapped his son and he’d be glad. He’d be happy that his wife was better.

The news returns. It’s not her, which makes sense, he realizes now. He would have seen squad cars, caution tape, news crews. This girl lived a couple suburbs to the north and it happened at the mall. He slugged her on the back of the head with a blackjack, hoisted her over his shoulder and tossed her in the back of a conversion van. When he was done he opened up the back doors rolled her out and took off.

The field reporter is interviewing a woman, around forty with thick glass lenses, a shopper outside the mall. “It’s just terrible,” she says. “You know somebody saw something and just kept on walking.” They aren’t releasing the girl’s name but have provided a sketch of the perpetrator. A white male late 30’s to early 40’s. He’s clean cut. His nose is crooked and his mouth slightly aslant but gives the impression that when he smiles everything evens out.

Michael sits on his side of the bed and takes off his shoes. He can hear her rattling around with the lint trap, the dryer door shut, and the clicking of buttons and zippers slapping against aluminum. She does laundry now before bed. She returns to the bedroom with an empty basket and places it by the door and walks towards the bathroom.

“I’m sorry,” he says. His hands are in his pockets. He thumbs the seam of the panties. If she had heard him she does not acknowledge it and continues walking in to the bathroom. Michael knows when she emerges her hair will be up in a pony tail. She’ll have on a pair of his pajama bottoms which he never wears, amassing a collection given to him each Christmas by one of his sister in laws. She’ll smell of the deodorant that she puts on, for some unknowable reason, before bed. This is true and she comes out of the bathroom just so.

“Throw your clothes in the hamper. I’ll wash them tomorrow morning.

“I’m going to wear these pants tomorrow,” Michael says.

“Whatever,” she says.

Michael mimics her under his breath. He undresses, folds his pants and places them on the top of the chest that stands against the far wall. He sleeps shirtless and in his underwear most nights. Sometimes he sleeps in his clothes like he did as a child, depending on how tired he comes home. His shirt and socks he puts in the hamper.

Michelle is on her side of the bed facing the door with her arms curled up towards her chest. Michael sees her lips moving and for a moment thinks she is talking to him in a low whisper, but she is not. She’s praying. The Bible pressed against her chest. The sight is unsettling and Michael turns off the light to the bedroom, but Michelle with her eyes shut continues, unfazed, to pray for him, he knows.

His side of the bed faces the window. Outside, houses are being built in the opposing subdivision. Decent square footage for the money but the resale value won’t be worth anything for at least half a decade. The surrounding area is still the sticks, subdivisions strung together by country road, fast food joints and supermarkets just emerging. The wind blows the saplings and they bend slightly in their mulch beds. Michelle turns toward Michael, cradles herself around him and places her hand on his hip.

“Did you have a girlfriend?” she asks. “When you were his age.”

Michael has always been astounded and fearful of Michelle’s ability to forgive. Not that he shouldn’t be forgiven. He is genuinely sorry. But her willingness to take him back in her arms is startling and something he has never fully understood. She didn’t blame him that night in the meeting like he thought she intended. He didn’t know why he thought she was going to do so, and he still doesn’t. But it was a rational fear at the time. She said she had lost part of her life drinking and now that it was gone it was the part she wanted the most. It sounded cliché to Michael but not wholly untrue. She missed part of her son’s youth she said and watched her husband become detached and spiteful towards her, but justifiably so. She said she knew she had to win these things back. But he had never told her to quit. He’d never tried to take a drink out of her hand. She’d asked, she had told him make me stop. He’d say things like you’re a big girl you can decide when you’ve had enough. It was his fault, partially, he thinks, she was the way she was.

Up at the podium she started crying. Michael grew uncomfortable in his desk. He turned his feet on their edges and pushed down, putting pressure on his ankles like an ascetic that could consume the pain of others if he inflicted himself with a comparable if not greater amount. But he gave up halfway through and had to pretend that she was someone else and that he was someone else. She told a story that he had forgotten about. There had been so many, but it was her bottom and he didn’t remember it. He’d forgotten that she had hit Sam. He kept waiting for her to tell the one he remembered the one where he despised her most. But she didn’t.

With her hand on his hip he pretends to be asleep. She leaves it there for a long time. He breathes in the smell of her deodorant and eventually falls asleep.

The school is rectangular and beige as if it were some fort constructed out of large appliance boxes duct taped together. Michael has been waiting since before the buses arrived. A song plays on the radio that Michael vaguely remembers the words to and he sings along to pass the time conflating verses and mumbling everything else, but he knows the chorus and sings that loudly. The final bell rings, a minute passes and children begin to trickle out of the front doors, loitering outside the bus doors. Their clothes are too big for them Michael thinks. The style maybe or perhaps their parents are trying to save a little extra dough, buying their kids something they’ll grow in to.

He looks for her now, not knowing exactly what he’s looking for but he looks all the same. Most of girls faces are blooming with acne and their hair is matted and greasy. They talk with each other in small circles. He knows that she’ll be different, already stepping outside the realm of puberty into woman hood. She’ll be more independent; girls will be following at her heels.

He sees Sam now, exiting the building. His backpack bulges with his book and he laughs with his friends. Michael looks for Rick among the clique but doesn’t see him. He hasn’t seen her yet either and he contemplates letting Sam take the bus home and waiting until the building has cleared out. Sam catches a glimpse of the car and then him in it and Michael beeps the horn. Sam gives a head nod to his friends and walks over to the car. He opens the door and slumps his gargantuan backpack into the back seat. He sits and buckles himself in.

“Mom didn’t say you were picking me up today.”

“She doesn’t know. I got off work early and was driving by and thought I’d surprise you.” Michael looks out the window toward the school’s doors, “Does Rick need a ride?”

“He wasn’t in school today. I think he stayed home sick.”

“Was his sister in school?”

“We’re not doing this again are we?”

“No,” Michael laughs uncomfortably because he knows those aren’t Sam’s words but Michelle’s, falling out of his mouth like bricks on to Michael’s toes. “But when one gets sick the other tends to get sick too, at least that’s how it was in my family.”

“I didn’t see her. But we don’t have any classes together.”

“Let’s stop by and see if they need you to pick up their homework.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Well, it’s the nice thing to do.”

“Whatever.”

Rick’s house is located in a suburb to the north of the one Michael lives in. Here, the curbs are high and lined with old Sears Catalog Houses with years of extensions built on to them that are nice and big. There are new houses too, built to look like old ones, most with Victorian undertones, which makes them nice. Rick’s house is a new one that looks old. It has shutters but they don’t work, just for decoration. The lawn is remarkable and the house is a good quarter larger than their own, probably four bedrooms, three and a half baths, and a finished basement.

“You wait here.”

“I was planning on it.”

They walkway from the drive to the door is lined with white quartz and Michael tries to walk it with a steady gait but he can feel his knees going weak and reluctant. The curtains are drawn around their front bay window. He sees a shadowed figure moving inside and the low rumblings of a talk show. He rings the doorbell and waits. Someone sighs and the shuffle of footsteps sound. The door opens and a woman stands in front of him with a striped collared blouse and pearls around her neck. Her hair is cut close to her scalp in a butch manner but she is not unattractive. She smiles and her teeth are coffee stained.

“Yes?” she says.

“Hi. I’m Sam’s father,” he points to Sam in the car. He’s reading a book. Behind her is a hallway that leads to the kitchen. A court television program is on and a cat sleeps on the back of a recliner in their front room. “Sam told me that Rick and, I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten your daughter’s name.”

“Joan.”

“Rick and Joan weren’t in school today and I was wondering if it was going to be a while, if you might need Sam to pick up their homework tomorrow.”

“No thanks,” she says. “They’re both feeling better.” He sees a girl walk into the kitchen, from the bathroom maybe, just the back of her visible. Her hair falls past her shoulders and she is dressed in pink pajama bottoms, some word written on the butt, and a white t-shirt.

“I see,” he says. “Just a twenty-four hour bug or something. Sometimes it can just be something you ate.” The girls stands with a glass at the kitchen island, backlit and faceless by the sliding glass door behind her. He sees a quarter of her face and then it falls into shadow. Her nose is petite and angular. It falls into shadow and then he catches her cheek and forehead, heart shaped and slightly bulbous. He catches another quarter and then into shadow again. He knows he has seen her whole face but will not be able to put the pieces together.

Her hair drips into her shoulders and she disappears for a moment and returns with a gallon of milk and a bottle of chocolate syrup. She hums to herself.

“That’s true,” the mother says. She’s forcing a smile out of politeness.

He wants to stay and watch but he can feel himself getting hard in front of this woman. He puts his hands in his pockets to camouflage the bulge that is forming. The girl stirs the milk and he can feel his penis nudging itself against his boxers against his will with each ting of the spoon and he is trying to smile back without it seeming awkward. But it is already. It is awkward. He doesn’t want this.

“I’m glad everyone is feeling better,” he says. She nods and he walks back to the car trying to calm himself. His hands tremor and he fishes he keys from his pocket but drops them in the grass. He hasn’t heard her shut the door. Sam is thumbing through the pages of a text book, gauging how much he has left to read. Michael’s cheeks and lips feel warm and there is a faint metallic tinge in the air as if it were about to rain, but the sky is blue and cloudless. He kneels and picks up his keys. Michael opens the door and sits in the car and Sam looks up at him. Michael starts the engine.

“Your nose is bleeding,” Sam says.

Michael sticks out his tongue and licks the blood running over the edge of his lips. “It is. Look for a napkin or something.”

Blood plops into Michaels lap. Sam opens the glove box to search. Michael pulls the panties from his back pocket, palming them tightly to prevent Sam from seeing. He tilts his head back and applies pressure to his nose.

“I can’t find any in here.”

“I got it. I remembered I had my handkerchief.”

“She’s watching us.”

“I know. How about some McDonald’s, bud?”

“Sure.”

The house is empty when they get home. Michelle is at her meeting. There is a note from her on the dry erase board connected by a magnet to the refrigerator. Dinner is already made and when she gets home they will eat together. In the kitchen he removes their burgers and fries from the bag and puts them on glass plates. He hands a plate to Sam and they sit in the living room eating. They watch Jeopardy, the news, COPS, and now Wheel of Fortune has started.

He picks up their plates and brings them to the kitchen sink and washes them. He dries them and puts them away. Sam is whispering guesses to the puzzle to himself. Michael slides the panties out of his back pocket and unfolds them, Rorschach‘s red butterfly. He puts the underwear in the McDonald’s bag and crumples the bag and shoves it into the garbage until it sits at the bottom.

“We’ll have to eat again when Mom gets home,” Sam says.

“Yes.” Michael says. “Don’t say anything about the McDonald’s”

“I know.”

They didn’t say anything to each other when she finished talking, or when they said goodbye to Chuck, or when they walked out of the church. They didn’t talk until the first red light. Michael’s ankles hurt.

“Well?” she said.

“Well?” he said. The light turned green and she kept her eyes on him and he pretended not to notice until it became unbearable. “That’s not the story I would’ve. That’s not the story I thought you were going to tell. There have been worse times than that. He is not mad at you about that. He probably doesn’t even remember.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe” she said and then she stopped. “Sometimes it seems like the only thing I’m capable of remembering.” He expected her to cry like she’d done before and beg for his forgiveness, or at least to ask what story he thought she was going to tell and then cry when she realized that, yes, that time was much worse, it should’ve been her bottom. But she said nothing. She only looked out the window and rested her hand on top of his thigh as he drove, and he knew that she was better.

If You Could Be Any Animal, What Would You Be?

scurtin2 — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:30:05 +0000

A deer is lost in the desert licking Lot’s Wife, wondering her name.

A gray horse grazes among rose bushes (fuchsia) that grow wild on a foothill in Sorrento, his tail swinging towards the sea making waves.

A goose loafs on some old man’s farm off a road called Bliss with his head bowed. A thin layer of snow covers the ground and the manila stalks of last year’s corn crop poke through, aslant and at discordant lengths. He eats thawing kernels and locust shells. But memory doesn’t serve, perhaps, he thinks, there is a lake there, forgotten, frozen, and he stops eating to exhale his small, hot breath against the ice in some insane effort to regain normality.

The Myth of You

scurtin2 — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:14:19 +0000

Joseph Campbell’s ghost is dressed in a three piece suit,
            a Windsor knot butts tightly against his neck.
He floats with a Dickensian transparency and a grayish-blue tint.
            He stuffs a pipe, concentrating his Jimmy Stewart
good-natured looks for the job and tokes heavily. Joe, I say,
            I stand on an atoll with sand in my mouth and You
is a whale, very blue and very heavy, and when You moans
            to me (which is rare) in the darkest of the night, You
keeps herself submerged and I can only tell it is You by the
            pattern innate in the steam that rises from her blowhole.

Yes, Joe says, exhaling pipe smoke, which incidentally looks as if
            he has exhaled part of himself, a whale; the ruler of the
subconscious, navigator of the unknown. And the sand, the atoll;
            liminality, isolation, the brink, you see, of rationality, the
high tide impends at night, and whale moans and blowholes
            call the hero. The sand in the mouth; a symbol of infinity
grinding against the hard palate, an uneasiness with death, a reluctance
            to let go. He bites the mouthpiece of his pipe and smiles, and inspects
the ceiling with his rolling eyes as if some of his thoughts escaped
            from his ghostly cranium. No, Joe, I say, no symbols this is literal.

I need to become a whale, Joe. How do I become a whale?

Joe crosses his legs and smoothes his trouser over his shin. Well, drown,
            he says, you must risk drowning or be saved. He clicks his teeth
against his mouthpiece again and then has a thought, folds his hands on his lap.
            Whales, he says, make love belly-to-belly. Did you know that?
It is a beautifully torturous thing. Their eyes are so far set that they cannot
            see each other while they do it, only the goings on around them,
small voyeuristic fish and shadows cast by the light above. He smiles
            a slant ways smile and slowly disappears and the faint sound
of chains rattling can be heard accompanied by Joe’s muffled laughter.

How To Waste A Day (Male Specific)

scurtin2 — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:17:48 +0000

Wake up at Noon, urinate into a cup
you keep at your beside. If it’s almost
full dump it out the window onto the drive
(the splat is fun to listen to). Do not brush
your teeth. Do breathe in the funk of your pits
at random intervals, or when the mood strikes.

Surf internet porn and jerk off twice into
a dirty sock, once to lesbians and then
something more unseemly maybe bondage
or anal, perhaps a combination of the two.
Your dick will feel raw but you will be satisfied,
and that is what today is about.

Watch court television and talk shows for
three hours straight, laugh at the reality
of ethnic and socioeconomic stereotypes
because if you don‘t you‘ll cry and that
takes far more energy. Find out who Laquita’s
baby’s daddy really is and the shocking
twist of why Nancy would sleep with
her husband and son (God told her it
would bring Jesus Our Savior back)

Eat Lucky Charms and a grape jelly
sandwich, or something that is easy to
make and substantially void of nutrition:
the misfit, leftover Halloween candy,
a handful or two of those things wrapped
in black and orange wax paper (taffy?)
that taste, as if reminiscing, of
peanut butter and go enjoyably well
with the jelly stuck to your fingers.

Think about an ex dying in a freak accident,
something funnier than it is gruesome:
a Nerf dart to the eye that pops a
brain embolism, dropping her to the floor
like a bag full of amputated limbs.

Go to sleep while the sun is still up (call it a nap).
Wake up in the middle of the night and
read the personals on Craigslist, send messages
outlining their grammatical errors (a lot is two
words and cannot one, use capital letters and
correct punctuation, Cummings is dead).

Sleep after that and then again after that.

Repeat starting at noon if further lethargy is desired.

Wooing

scurtin2 — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:01:17 +0000

Two sets
            of footsteps
                        in medias res
            arms swing
at sides
            like cow tails
                        hands
            content
to graze
            Say
                        Look
            the stars
No
            (obvious)
                        lie
                                     or pretend

            Say
Look
            that rod iron
                        fence
            jutting
from the concrete
            with the proper
                        metaphor that
                                    could be Love

            or
the gum-puddled
            sidewalk
                       mottled like
            pigeon feathers
that is the stars
            Say
                        and those things
            above
UFOs
            that only loonies
                        claim
                                    to have seen

Never Think of Oranges

scurtin2 — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 21:12:58 +0000

One winter, I awoke from a dream I can’t remember.
Still with a foot in it, I watched snowflakes drift
past your window, and for a moment
I thought it was us falling
past the snow
And then I wanted it to be so.

You slept and the streetlight washed through the window
and soap had dried on your earlobe. Your face,
in the cool blue-black of the room
took on a celestial androgyny
and your body
gave off this immense heat, nauseating me.

I sat up and pressed my forehead against the window
to calm my stomach. You mumbled something
in your sleep and I asked you what you said
but you didn’t answer.
I watched the snow build on car hoods
Until my face grew cold and then
I fell asleep next to you,
trying to steal your heat.

Another winter now, and there’s no snow outside
the bay windows of the grocery store I work at,
only a vacant parking lot bleached by
salt stains from a since-melted snowfall
and I stock oranges, two at a time in each hand,
before the sun has risen
and never think of oranges.