Martha fixed him a cup of tea, serving it with the remains of a bag of chocolate cookies (extra soft, extra fudge!) that she had mostly devoured the night before. They sat together at the red linoleum table in the kitchenette, the puppies frolicking on the pine plank floor at their feet.
She knew he probably came around for money. She knew he probably had spent the twenty dollars she had given him on drugs. She had been stupid to give it to him, but her heart had ached so at the thought of the puppies alone with him, she hadn’t been able to help herself.
“What’s their names?” Martha said. The cookie she was holding collapsed in two, the other half falling on the floor. The pups sniffed at it as if unsure whether it was food or not. One of them, the bigger one with the spots, took a tentative lick.
“Leave it alone!” the boy-man said, then picked the cookie up and stuffed it in his own mouth. It was at this moment that the thought occurred to Martha that his skeleton body might be caused by something other than drugs. She thought again of the angel wings on his back, wondered if they were flapping softly as he chewed.
He needs a mother, she thought, no, not a mother, but something. He needs me.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Eating Alone - Kent Wright
At noontime the modest reception salon with its uncomfortable couch and two chairs is a parking lot for wheel chairs. They are parked chaotically like abandoned cars in a disaster film in front of the doors to the dining room. It is the dining room where the residents of the nursing home can, with varying degrees of success, feed themselves. The room has been functionalized for easy cleaning. To give some sense of hominess there are two undersized fake crystal chandeliers, which glitter rather sadly. They can’t compete with the harsher blue light of large, square fluorescent fixtures mounted tight to the ceiling.
The residents of the nursing home sit each morning, noon and early evening at the same tables, four to a table. The dietician with her clipboard oversees the distribution of the mostly monochromatic food. She wants to make sure each tray is placed in front of the right person. Most of those persons are females. They almost all have the same poodle cut which a woman from a beauty shop in Parker gives them. All the hair is white. Men die first so there aren’t many of them in the dining room. Of the five there currently, only one can carry on much of a conversation. At the second table in from the door there are just three people. A woman who hasn’t spoken for years, Bill, a man who once had his own plane and a landing strip on his farm, but remembers neither, and my Mother. She takes perhaps three or four slow bites of the tasteless lunch before her head nods forward and she falls asleep. The dietician makes a note. She is eating only 25% of her food the report will say.
Recommendation: Consider moving Maxine to the dining room where the staff can assist with feeding.
The residents of the nursing home sit each morning, noon and early evening at the same tables, four to a table. The dietician with her clipboard oversees the distribution of the mostly monochromatic food. She wants to make sure each tray is placed in front of the right person. Most of those persons are females. They almost all have the same poodle cut which a woman from a beauty shop in Parker gives them. All the hair is white. Men die first so there aren’t many of them in the dining room. Of the five there currently, only one can carry on much of a conversation. At the second table in from the door there are just three people. A woman who hasn’t spoken for years, Bill, a man who once had his own plane and a landing strip on his farm, but remembers neither, and my Mother. She takes perhaps three or four slow bites of the tasteless lunch before her head nods forward and she falls asleep. The dietician makes a note. She is eating only 25% of her food the report will say.
Recommendation: Consider moving Maxine to the dining room where the staff can assist with feeding.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Father - Bud Pfohl
Sometimes I make believe there’s a father there, a man I can go to who has answers to my questions and if not answers a willingness to listen. This wasn’t something I missed until I recognized my son was taking advantage of having a father to ask questions of. He doesn’t ask the sort of questions I’d ask, but that’s likely the result of having always had someone to ask.
I tuck my questions away. Sometimes I write them down and they answer themselves, but generally I file them with a wish that I could ask them out loud. I was lucky after my father died in that I had men in my life who took on many of his roles, but I didn’t feel comfortable enough to ask the sort of questions I always wanted to ask: if she likes me, why does she ignore me?, If I like her how come it hurts in the pit of my stomach?, She’s afraid she’s pregnant, what should I do? These are questions I would never have asked my father, but because he wasn’t there, I always thought how much better it would be if he was and I could ask him these questions.
Actually I probably asked my dad as many questions after he died as I did when he was alive; probably more. I used to lay awake in bed after he died and long after I’d stopped saying prayers, and I’d pray these questions to my dad. I could make up the answers just like I used to make up the answers to my childhood prayers.
I remember childhood prayers, every night kneeling beside my brother, our mom standing behind us and praying that God would keep my soul if I dies. I did it, but it frightened me. I know that prayer like I know the Little League Pledge: Now I lay me down to sleep, I trust in God, I love my country and will respect its laws, I pray the lord my soul to keep, I will play fair and strive to win, If I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take, but win or lose I will always do my best.
My mom said if we said our prayers each night we could ask God for special favors, she called them blessings. Out loud I asked for my grandma and my grandpa to be OK and for the war in Viet Nam to end, but there was a silent voice, as loud as my spoken voice, that asked for hits at my next baseball game and for Denise Myers to smile at me during recess tomorrow.
I tuck my questions away. Sometimes I write them down and they answer themselves, but generally I file them with a wish that I could ask them out loud. I was lucky after my father died in that I had men in my life who took on many of his roles, but I didn’t feel comfortable enough to ask the sort of questions I always wanted to ask: if she likes me, why does she ignore me?, If I like her how come it hurts in the pit of my stomach?, She’s afraid she’s pregnant, what should I do? These are questions I would never have asked my father, but because he wasn’t there, I always thought how much better it would be if he was and I could ask him these questions.
Actually I probably asked my dad as many questions after he died as I did when he was alive; probably more. I used to lay awake in bed after he died and long after I’d stopped saying prayers, and I’d pray these questions to my dad. I could make up the answers just like I used to make up the answers to my childhood prayers.
I remember childhood prayers, every night kneeling beside my brother, our mom standing behind us and praying that God would keep my soul if I dies. I did it, but it frightened me. I know that prayer like I know the Little League Pledge: Now I lay me down to sleep, I trust in God, I love my country and will respect its laws, I pray the lord my soul to keep, I will play fair and strive to win, If I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take, but win or lose I will always do my best.
My mom said if we said our prayers each night we could ask God for special favors, she called them blessings. Out loud I asked for my grandma and my grandpa to be OK and for the war in Viet Nam to end, but there was a silent voice, as loud as my spoken voice, that asked for hits at my next baseball game and for Denise Myers to smile at me during recess tomorrow.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Anatomy Lesson - E. D. James
The ever-evolving nature of the carnage stuck in my mind, populated my dreams, and dominated my life every fifth day. The death walk tally mounting week-by-week, month-by-month. Slimy wings rejected by gulls’ intestines. Downy piles of feathers in crannies in the rocks comforting the bones that were all that remained of hardy little creatures whose only crime was try and raise a family in the Islands of the Dead.
Death brought me here. A death I never expected. A death I caused. A death that came in the midst of so much life that it overflowed out of my control.
I search for the meaning of that death in observations I record here on my self-imposed island of exile. I hope for a redemption that comes from dedication to something larger than my wants and needs. I pray for forgiveness for a deed committed in a time of turmoil.
The seas and the air and the surface of the rocks that make up the island are in a constant maelstrom that infuses energy into the life that inhabits this fertile boundary at the edge of the continent. Frigid waters charged with oxygen well up from the depths and power an ever-expanding web of life that grows in mass even as the weak are cannibalized by the strong within its ranks.
Surrounded by death that comes in so many forms, I contemplate the inconvenient life that I allowed to be sucked from my womb. I sit with the choice I believed was made to protect, but may only have been an acknowledgement of weakness. I long for acceptance so that I may find the strength to move on and resurrect the light within me.
Death brought me here. A death I never expected. A death I caused. A death that came in the midst of so much life that it overflowed out of my control.
I search for the meaning of that death in observations I record here on my self-imposed island of exile. I hope for a redemption that comes from dedication to something larger than my wants and needs. I pray for forgiveness for a deed committed in a time of turmoil.
The seas and the air and the surface of the rocks that make up the island are in a constant maelstrom that infuses energy into the life that inhabits this fertile boundary at the edge of the continent. Frigid waters charged with oxygen well up from the depths and power an ever-expanding web of life that grows in mass even as the weak are cannibalized by the strong within its ranks.
Surrounded by death that comes in so many forms, I contemplate the inconvenient life that I allowed to be sucked from my womb. I sit with the choice I believed was made to protect, but may only have been an acknowledgement of weakness. I long for acceptance so that I may find the strength to move on and resurrect the light within me.
Biarritz - Kent Wright
BIARRITZ
Making Believe
July 19, 2010
If she stayed, and it had ceased to be a question she considered, this would make her third year living in the two rooms just beneath the well-known writer and his wife. She often heard their light, slippered footsteps, but had glimpsed them only once from behind as they disappeared on a path into the pine forest which shared the beach with the Atlantic. That first year she had begun the scandalous novel that had made him a star, but finding it too tricky for her taste, “forgot it” one afternoon in the sand. Nonetheless, his presence was sited as an example of the “marvelous stimulation” she enjoyed at the Hotel due Palais, when friends urged that she return to Vienna and “work through” her grief. “But he lives just above you know,” she would reply softly into the phone.
This was the same hotel where she had spent her eleventh through fifteenth summers, began puberty, fell in love with a pale blond boy, and experienced the pain that passion and one grain of sand can inflict. Her husband Karl had refused, even when she pleaded “just for old time’s sake”, to consider spending even a single night in the dreary relic as he liked to call it. When Karl collapsed, sighed softly once, and died aboard a Viennese tram, Vivian decamped soon after with luggage and only a small carry-on of grief for the hotel of her adolescence.
She left the note from the concierge (reread twice) on her dressing table amid a vast the array of creams, brushes and pastes. “Madame,” it said, “a gentleman waits for you in the salon, and refuses to leave. He says his name is P------. The messy, wet thumb of the concierge had dissolved the rest.
--------
Playing It Cool
July 19, 2010
Paul fidgeted in the large, maroon chair. He tried to make the rectangle of the old hotel’s lobby, and it’s tall, green draped windows match his memory. It seemed too sparse. There were many more antiques in the pictures he had from that summer. The stairs ascended in the same precise corner, but a silly mezzanine had cruelly abbreviated its grandness. Paul was not alone in the chilly, dust-spiked light of the Biarritz hotel. Several pensioned gentlemen read their morning journals in dark chairs of identical age and fabric. The clack-clip, clack-clip of heels on the marble stair caused him to look up. A shiver of concern traveled along his back.
Of course she would be different after the decades which… He gained control of himself.
The steps became the feet that bore the calves that appeared below the harsh horizontal of the mezzanine. The jelly of the pale thighs, which ended beneath the summer cotton of tan culottes, quivered as each step was carefully considered. Paul leaned forward involuntarily forgetting his oath to be discovered in a pose of indifference and impatience. Now only two treads and a mere three meters from the meeting, Vivian (absent the dark bloom of her 15th summer) paused. She lurched a bit against the dark carved wood of the banister.
‘Which is he?’ she wondered scanning the choice of ghosts scattered about in the low light. ‘Perhaps the one there that seemed about to stand just now.’
Exposed
July 22, 2010
She stepped onto the dark stone of hotel’s salon. She hesitated and adjusted, or appeared to, the mauve and peach scarf swirled in the manner of French women about her throat. Paul didn’t wait to stand although it seemed so because he struggled slightly to get up from the deep chair.
“Vivian,” he said with just a hint of question in case the woman in the short culottes once again in motion was not the Vivian he sought. Her short heels clicked on the stone. She was extending her pale arm and its fingers covered with a variety of rings towards him now. Something uncomfortable spoke to him briefly from the pit of his stomach.
“Ma Cheri,” he woman gushed. “You are of course the same, ah…” It was here that her voice failed, and she averted her face slightly and displayed both palms to him helplessly.
Paul squinted trying to make this woman, who seemed unfortunately about to cry, morph into the image that old photograph he had carried with him from London. That girl, posed before the stripped awning of this hotel, was young, and thin with dark curls framing a pretty face. Before him, in Technicolor was, well… someone considerably larger with wisps of blond escaping from her turban.
“You’ve come back. Come back. You are standing just here once more.” She had recovered her voice and shook her head from side to side. “But please, lets sit again on the terrace. You’ll remember that. Coffee? Oh, let’s do remember everything. Everything.” She was already passing the palm by the doors. He followed obediently behind her behind onto the bright terrace. She sat quickly in a white wicker chair at the edge of the terrace. Behind her the smooth, morning sea was still awakening in colors of grey and blue.
“Now Phillip, my darling Phillip.” Her hands were clasped under her chin. “I can hold nothing back. The memories sweep up me.., no over me,” The hands fluttered, and seemed about to target his hand.
“Vivian.” He was flushed and seemed himself now close to tears. How had this happened he thought? “Vivian, I am not Phillip. My brother,” he was rushing ahead insanely now, “my brother is dead. Phillip is dead. That is what I came for. I am Paul.” He stood up extremely straight, bowed slightly and offered his hand. “In fact we have never met.”
Not What She Expected
July 27, 2010
Vivian did not move for several seconds. Her thin, rouged lips hung slightly apart. Then she slowly pulled the large sunglasses away from her face in the manner one often sees in bad film. She lurched forward, not far, but so suddenly the man opposite jerked back. She squinted at him although the sun was still safely behind the grey silk of the morning.
Inside her head the blood vessels bulged from the terrible pressure of excitement being ravaged by confusion. The images projected on her screens of consciousness ricocheted back and forth with bewildering speed between the still handsome, and familiar – oh dear, yes, so familiar- face across the table, and the blue eyes and soft smile of a sixteen year boy decades before. Behind them both stretched the strand with its thin pines and low dunes where blankets had been spread and skin had experienced for the first time the thrill of nonfamiliar touch.
Making Believe
July 19, 2010
If she stayed, and it had ceased to be a question she considered, this would make her third year living in the two rooms just beneath the well-known writer and his wife. She often heard their light, slippered footsteps, but had glimpsed them only once from behind as they disappeared on a path into the pine forest which shared the beach with the Atlantic. That first year she had begun the scandalous novel that had made him a star, but finding it too tricky for her taste, “forgot it” one afternoon in the sand. Nonetheless, his presence was sited as an example of the “marvelous stimulation” she enjoyed at the Hotel due Palais, when friends urged that she return to Vienna and “work through” her grief. “But he lives just above you know,” she would reply softly into the phone.
This was the same hotel where she had spent her eleventh through fifteenth summers, began puberty, fell in love with a pale blond boy, and experienced the pain that passion and one grain of sand can inflict. Her husband Karl had refused, even when she pleaded “just for old time’s sake”, to consider spending even a single night in the dreary relic as he liked to call it. When Karl collapsed, sighed softly once, and died aboard a Viennese tram, Vivian decamped soon after with luggage and only a small carry-on of grief for the hotel of her adolescence.
She left the note from the concierge (reread twice) on her dressing table amid a vast the array of creams, brushes and pastes. “Madame,” it said, “a gentleman waits for you in the salon, and refuses to leave. He says his name is P------. The messy, wet thumb of the concierge had dissolved the rest.
--------
Playing It Cool
July 19, 2010
Paul fidgeted in the large, maroon chair. He tried to make the rectangle of the old hotel’s lobby, and it’s tall, green draped windows match his memory. It seemed too sparse. There were many more antiques in the pictures he had from that summer. The stairs ascended in the same precise corner, but a silly mezzanine had cruelly abbreviated its grandness. Paul was not alone in the chilly, dust-spiked light of the Biarritz hotel. Several pensioned gentlemen read their morning journals in dark chairs of identical age and fabric. The clack-clip, clack-clip of heels on the marble stair caused him to look up. A shiver of concern traveled along his back.
Of course she would be different after the decades which… He gained control of himself.
The steps became the feet that bore the calves that appeared below the harsh horizontal of the mezzanine. The jelly of the pale thighs, which ended beneath the summer cotton of tan culottes, quivered as each step was carefully considered. Paul leaned forward involuntarily forgetting his oath to be discovered in a pose of indifference and impatience. Now only two treads and a mere three meters from the meeting, Vivian (absent the dark bloom of her 15th summer) paused. She lurched a bit against the dark carved wood of the banister.
‘Which is he?’ she wondered scanning the choice of ghosts scattered about in the low light. ‘Perhaps the one there that seemed about to stand just now.’
Exposed
July 22, 2010
She stepped onto the dark stone of hotel’s salon. She hesitated and adjusted, or appeared to, the mauve and peach scarf swirled in the manner of French women about her throat. Paul didn’t wait to stand although it seemed so because he struggled slightly to get up from the deep chair.
“Vivian,” he said with just a hint of question in case the woman in the short culottes once again in motion was not the Vivian he sought. Her short heels clicked on the stone. She was extending her pale arm and its fingers covered with a variety of rings towards him now. Something uncomfortable spoke to him briefly from the pit of his stomach.
“Ma Cheri,” he woman gushed. “You are of course the same, ah…” It was here that her voice failed, and she averted her face slightly and displayed both palms to him helplessly.
Paul squinted trying to make this woman, who seemed unfortunately about to cry, morph into the image that old photograph he had carried with him from London. That girl, posed before the stripped awning of this hotel, was young, and thin with dark curls framing a pretty face. Before him, in Technicolor was, well… someone considerably larger with wisps of blond escaping from her turban.
“You’ve come back. Come back. You are standing just here once more.” She had recovered her voice and shook her head from side to side. “But please, lets sit again on the terrace. You’ll remember that. Coffee? Oh, let’s do remember everything. Everything.” She was already passing the palm by the doors. He followed obediently behind her behind onto the bright terrace. She sat quickly in a white wicker chair at the edge of the terrace. Behind her the smooth, morning sea was still awakening in colors of grey and blue.
“Now Phillip, my darling Phillip.” Her hands were clasped under her chin. “I can hold nothing back. The memories sweep up me.., no over me,” The hands fluttered, and seemed about to target his hand.
“Vivian.” He was flushed and seemed himself now close to tears. How had this happened he thought? “Vivian, I am not Phillip. My brother,” he was rushing ahead insanely now, “my brother is dead. Phillip is dead. That is what I came for. I am Paul.” He stood up extremely straight, bowed slightly and offered his hand. “In fact we have never met.”
Not What She Expected
July 27, 2010
Vivian did not move for several seconds. Her thin, rouged lips hung slightly apart. Then she slowly pulled the large sunglasses away from her face in the manner one often sees in bad film. She lurched forward, not far, but so suddenly the man opposite jerked back. She squinted at him although the sun was still safely behind the grey silk of the morning.
Inside her head the blood vessels bulged from the terrible pressure of excitement being ravaged by confusion. The images projected on her screens of consciousness ricocheted back and forth with bewildering speed between the still handsome, and familiar – oh dear, yes, so familiar- face across the table, and the blue eyes and soft smile of a sixteen year boy decades before. Behind them both stretched the strand with its thin pines and low dunes where blankets had been spread and skin had experienced for the first time the thrill of nonfamiliar touch.
Playing it Cool - Kate Bueler
Playing it cool. I am playing cool on a small tight compacted plane. Playing it cool by remembering to take the prescribed relaxation at the right time. About 20 minutes before the flight. Flying I used to do it all the time. Now yearly. Now every few months. Not every week. Every week being sent to a new place. A new place to try and connect a dc non profit to the state system. It never tied nicely into a bow.
Playing cool in the tightness of my seat- fake leather- seat change for someone else- but still the aisle. I am always in the aisle unless, unless no one sits next to me. I like the freedom to get out whenever I want without the excuse me. And the wait of the neighbor’s movement. The crampness of the tightness of the plane, I feel on my chest as I begin to heat up. Before the drips of cooling off happens, I find the artificial air knob to the lefty lossie. Air sprays on my face.
Playing it cool. I am on the first flight ever to last only 20 minutes. It is the first time I am going on a family vacation with an extended family derived from my mother. Playing it cool. It is the first time I am sitting next to a NJ firefight. He wears the appropriate uniform of muscles underneath his shirt and speaks in his accent. He has wrinkles of the shore on his face. His clothes prescribed for a firefighter just preppy enough but not too much.
Playing it cool. I like to talk to people. People all the time really but especially when I am nervous. I am nervous now. Now I am. Sometimes the fear of the confined space leaves but now, now it does not. I am playing it cool as I begin the back and forth teeter tooter of discussion of who are you, where are you going, where have you been. We only have 20 minutes. I am still hot. And uncomfortable. Let’s cover your bio quickly. As we talk, I can tell in the subtleness in between the chatter in the silences I can feel his glance my way. I can feel more words moving around his head brewing into audible noises. I know he is attracted to me. I am might be to him. I am not sure.
Playing cool. The more I talk I forget, forget about the uncomfortableness of this plane, of this aisle, of the air. I forget. When we get in the discussion of what do you do. Writing comes in. I learn something about him that given my own fear of anxiety of confined spaces I would have never learned. He too has an earring problem. He currently has a collection of women’s earrings at his house. He is a firefighter of course. I am sure he is popular with the ladies. Firefighters and professional athletes and any one with enough fame and power make women forget their first names and that they might have something to do other then open their legs. Some women chase power only in those that they bone. Others search for power on their own two feet.
He has an earring problem. He doesn’t collect those earrings on purpose- begging or ripping them off the ears of those he beds. No they leave them behind. They leave them behind as I do, as I have done. Done. But no one asks for them back he says. Why? Why don’t they ask. I always ask for them back. I say. Why do you leave them, why do they leave them. And never ask for them back. I don’t know. I always ask for mine back. I always do.
I am intrigued by this man with an earring collection of his own. His own personal history of women who he had conquered or vice versa but never came back for 2nds or thirds and never and never do they collect their leftovers of their earrings. They leave those behind. And just as I ask for the earring every time I leave them behind at a lovers. He never throws them away. Never does he throw them away. We all can’t let go. Let go for different reasons. But holding onto to what is ours and theirs so much that sometimes we forget why. Why we hold onto things, things that could be forgotten. Things that could have been. Different. In playing it cool you learn everyone has collections. Each one is different and unique but collections of our loves are just so hard to throw away. Away.
Playing cool in the tightness of my seat- fake leather- seat change for someone else- but still the aisle. I am always in the aisle unless, unless no one sits next to me. I like the freedom to get out whenever I want without the excuse me. And the wait of the neighbor’s movement. The crampness of the tightness of the plane, I feel on my chest as I begin to heat up. Before the drips of cooling off happens, I find the artificial air knob to the lefty lossie. Air sprays on my face.
Playing it cool. I am on the first flight ever to last only 20 minutes. It is the first time I am going on a family vacation with an extended family derived from my mother. Playing it cool. It is the first time I am sitting next to a NJ firefight. He wears the appropriate uniform of muscles underneath his shirt and speaks in his accent. He has wrinkles of the shore on his face. His clothes prescribed for a firefighter just preppy enough but not too much.
Playing it cool. I like to talk to people. People all the time really but especially when I am nervous. I am nervous now. Now I am. Sometimes the fear of the confined space leaves but now, now it does not. I am playing it cool as I begin the back and forth teeter tooter of discussion of who are you, where are you going, where have you been. We only have 20 minutes. I am still hot. And uncomfortable. Let’s cover your bio quickly. As we talk, I can tell in the subtleness in between the chatter in the silences I can feel his glance my way. I can feel more words moving around his head brewing into audible noises. I know he is attracted to me. I am might be to him. I am not sure.
Playing cool. The more I talk I forget, forget about the uncomfortableness of this plane, of this aisle, of the air. I forget. When we get in the discussion of what do you do. Writing comes in. I learn something about him that given my own fear of anxiety of confined spaces I would have never learned. He too has an earring problem. He currently has a collection of women’s earrings at his house. He is a firefighter of course. I am sure he is popular with the ladies. Firefighters and professional athletes and any one with enough fame and power make women forget their first names and that they might have something to do other then open their legs. Some women chase power only in those that they bone. Others search for power on their own two feet.
He has an earring problem. He doesn’t collect those earrings on purpose- begging or ripping them off the ears of those he beds. No they leave them behind. They leave them behind as I do, as I have done. Done. But no one asks for them back he says. Why? Why don’t they ask. I always ask for them back. I say. Why do you leave them, why do they leave them. And never ask for them back. I don’t know. I always ask for mine back. I always do.
I am intrigued by this man with an earring collection of his own. His own personal history of women who he had conquered or vice versa but never came back for 2nds or thirds and never and never do they collect their leftovers of their earrings. They leave those behind. And just as I ask for the earring every time I leave them behind at a lovers. He never throws them away. Never does he throw them away. We all can’t let go. Let go for different reasons. But holding onto to what is ours and theirs so much that sometimes we forget why. Why we hold onto things, things that could be forgotten. Things that could have been. Different. In playing it cool you learn everyone has collections. Each one is different and unique but collections of our loves are just so hard to throw away. Away.
Setting Fire to It - Anne Wright
He set the fire to watch the flames, to smell the smoke and to feel the heat. He was cold inside and out. He built the pyramid of sticks and branches, about a foot high, with crumpled up paper inside, like a miniature funeral pyre, only this time he planned to burn something that was alive. He had written her name on an index card and folded it into multiple triangles around a piece of her chewing gum he found on the sole of his shoe. How appropriate. He lifted the bottle of Jack Daniels to his lips. It burned, too. His sole. Her soul. He set fire with to it with a match from their favorite restaurant, the one overlooking the harbor where they had met one rainy winter night. He fell in love with her, wondering if this was what it was like, love at first sight. The flames licked the folded card and bubbled the gum, hot and crackling with a life of its own. It went up in wisps of curling grey smoke. Lucky the wind was quiet because he wanted the little cinders to float up as he incinerated his love for her. The orange and black cinders fell to the earth, life gone out.
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