The Fool
Sergio spoke of his madness. He painted during the day and at night—sometimes upright, sometimes leaning over his canvas with the brush in his hand dangling like an errant pendulum. His hair was thick, black curls bouncing with each brushstroke. He drank his spirits as he worked or had drunk spirits before he worked, and he drank all the time. He particularly favored the cafés on Rue du Renard; they served a pleasant absinthe after dark. He enjoyed hearing the beautiful women speak in their French.
He slept in the street when the circumstances sufficed. It was usually after the drink and upon a wooden bench. When the police would wake him to check on his life, he understood only fragments of their inquiries and accosting banter (he was rather fluent when sober, but as a drunk, regressed to his native Spanish). He would roll over and go back to sleep after a while and they left him alone.
Sergio spoke of his madness at the favorite of his haunts, Le Grand Michel. The proprietor was Jean Luc, a thin, gaunt fellow. His accent was thick and indistinct, but Sergio somehow understood him better than his countrymen. Sergio ordered a beer from the clerk in nearly-perfect French.
The café was empty except for an attractive woman lounging at the opposite end who wore a frilled skirt of cassimere and black stockings. In the kitchen Jean Luc swore at somebody; he, too, was fond of imported liqueurs and was a bit on edge.
“I will go to Munich,” Sergio explained to Alexis, sipping on his beer with steady necessity. “I will go there with my paints. It must be done.”
He had come from lands away and his origins had become a vague façade that he had nearly forgotten. When he took another sip of his drink, he tried to remember. He could barely recall the relief he felt as a child with the rain falling on the foothills north of the city after weeks of the grueling dust storms that had blighted the landscape. It was the graffiti plastered on the tired cement walls in all shapes, colors, and forms to which he would awake in the alley cold and alone; this he could barely grasp as a reality once his own. Salta and the rim of the Andes—the fields he tended with his father as a boy, his mother sick and dying—his grim survival in Buenos Aires. The things these were, far and gone, had punished him and yet, had formed his abilities to sustain. They punished and then resurrected him. Again he had heard the call to wander, as some form of remedy, urging for his home to become the legs upon which he walked.
“Does your fury overcome you?”
Sergio shook his head. “I have yet to take enough drink.”
“Then we must imbibe faster,” Alexis said subtly, grinning to himself. “For the growth of your fire and for the sad news of your leaving.”
At this time Jean Luc emerged from the kitchen and joined them at the table. He lit a cigarette, inhaled the smoke, and plopped his hands down onto his grease-stained apron. He gave sweet eyes to the woman in the dark stockings. She looked at him briefly.
“Do you know that Sergio leaves us?” Alexis interposed.
“So it is a sad day,” Jean Luc replied profoundly. He called to the kitchen to bring shots of the cheapest Swedish vodka he had in stock. “We must drink to commend the sorrowful loss of our friend Sergio, the famous painter with not enough money for a house.”
The three men laughed, raised their glasses when they arrived, looking each other in the eyes as tradition demanded, and clanged them together, omitting the uttered declaration of a toast.
Sergio exited the café on his own, heading in a direction away from the Notrê Dame Cathedral. He stopped in at a bar on the corner of Renard and Rambuteau. It was a brisk, dry summer day and the restaurateurs had ordered the umbrellas opened up for the patrons on the patio. Sergio seated himself at one of the small circular tables. He did sketches of the scene on the corner with a bit of his charcoal: a Parisian selling newspapers in a kiosk; pedestrians parking their moto-scooters in rows on the stone walkway across the spine of the Rue du Renard; importunate protestors of the student revolution sitting on the curb with signs, anachronisms of a cause that had been laid to rest over three years before.
Marco was on a park bench at the intersection, tossing bread to the pigeons. Sergio beckoned for him to come and sit.
“What do you paint, Sergio?” the Italian asked intensely, elevating to ally with his comrade. “I wish to see your mind.”
“Come, have a drink.”
When the waiter came, Marco requested a kir. He was always a worried soul and he had this demeanor about him. There was already a scent of alcohol on his breath. It was two o'clock and he was on his pause déjeuner—he was an assistant to the chef at a restaurant up the road.
“What do you paint, Sergio?”
Sergio threw up his hands. “A career is finished.”
Marco puckered his lips and sent kisses to a band of pigeons squawking by the nearby cobblestone. His hair was like a shrub on his head, bulky and round, and he had a moustache along with dark shaved stubble upon his chin and jaw-line. Marco had been generous at times, inviting the great Sergio to stay in his loft on a mat filled with straw. He had bought the hay from a farmer who had been driving through the city trying to sell pigs and stuffed it into a sack of coarse fabric. He had previously planned on an attempt of rearing a goat within the confined quarters of his flat, for the cultivation of its milk, but reconsidered after Sergio demurred on such an endeavor. Marco stated with much seriousness, after an overly formal recant, that Sergio could stay where the goat would have dwelt, whenever he needed. When the two tippled their excessive share, they would return in the wee hours and sleep like stone. Sergio, himself, would wake abruptly and ignite candles, working his trade with a maddening sense of purpose. He toiled for the night; his arms turned to rubber and the muscle fibers in his right hand tightened and cramped until he could sense their defeat no more. He had discovered the paint being his blood many years ago and so he carried canvas at all times to affront this egregious torment that would spur him in dark hours.
Sergio called for another drink.
Marco chuckled. “I remember Sergio the painter sleeping in the Parc Pont Marie with the derelicts of the city. His painful slumbers were his will to create. Have you been sleeping comfortably on a mattress of late?”
Sergio shook his head. “Will the drink feed me again, Marco?”
“The drink?” Marco pondered. “You must retrieve again your skill to forget tomorrow.”
The two men heard the sudden sharp, twiny plucking of the Spanish guitar. The rhythm of Flamenco propagated vehemently from the cantina across the road. Marco, living just above the cantina, would often stumble down to join the evening commotion if there were music about. He pointed toward the sound and rose to cross the street. Sergio procured a scant pile of Francs for the waiter and followed. They walked past a taxi parked at the corner waiting for a fare. The driver ruminated on a clump of baguette while one eye was still closed for a siesta. A bit of rare rain started to fall onto the Bastille stone and they could see the grey clouds overhead.
When they reached the other side Sergio could see the woman in the red dress. She danced, her legs kicking up and down, stomping down onto the floor with the eloquence of technique. Her hands clung lightly to the frill of her dress, the cloth spiraling like the cape of a matador as he performed his trick. As the guitar intensified she followed suit, each one of her appendages whirling in a perfected unison. She had a rose resting gently in her ear and a serpentine curl of black hair swirled down to meet its sanguine petals. She caught his eyes and smiled at the great Sergio and his adulation. He suddenly felt the rush of the canvas, the bright colors of his head spraying outward like a rainbow arcing across the heavens. Her lips were like red wine. Her body was like the wave of an ocean, a naiad of the sea, hued in coral by a dying sun. Each stroke must be a method, he thought, for she dances as though the world were vanished.
Sergio recalled himself as a boy, the misty-blue sky settling over the forest while his hand treated the deer hide that had been tautened on a mesh of twig and fiber. The first time he painted, he had felt the sun in his hands. His senses were heightened to the nature around him. All was mixt genuinely on his palette and his tools were before him, mustering to conjure. But these worlds and canvasses were destined to birth in a flash of light and then die quickly, into a dust that was unrecognizable as once the womb that had given its manna. These canvasses were fates of tired finale.
He abruptly walked away, leaving Marco to himself without a notion of farewell. He caught a passing bus to the French Quarter. Sitting down in a seat, he glanced out the windows and saw Marco back on the bench loitering patiently with bread in his lap. His eyes strayed up and to the side, and a smile graced him. He lofted some crumbs at his feet. In the end, he saw Sergio as the bus trundled down the road and he waved a goodbye with the same dubious smile that announced itself moments before.
Sergio was soon at a cheap bar that he knew well and ordered two beers from a new bartender he had never met. A local denizen came by and asked him if he had been able to sell any of his work to the gallery down the street. Sergio said he had sold one. There were too many people occupying the lounge behind where he sat. Gaudy exchanges manifested many of them to be lovers of Paris' trivial modes and the nuances of modern sophistication. No one sat next to him at the bar and he preferred it. He was in the abyss. He thought of the drink and how it could make him rise and rise, routing the dregs of his own mortality. The great Sergio would fly again and harbor the taste of a naked tomorrow within his mouth.
He bummed a cigarette off of a formerly-acquainted tourer of bars and smoked outside after other drinks consumed. He drifted into the alley and saw crude paint on its walls. He felt cramping in his stomach. The tobacco relieved him and he adored the shining colors relayed to his mind. He felt another sharp shooting in his gut. It caused him to hunch over. When he returned to the graffiti on the wall, the outer layers of his vision were muddled glass panes. He saw her nonetheless, an effigy of what was the great Flamenco dancer swaying on the wall like a lost dream in the wind, a rose dangling by her hair, her lips the color of a Cabernet in the sunset. The great Sergio would fly and fly again, his hand swishing across a canvass toward the triumph of his soul. Sergio felt something break inside. He fell to his knees onto the primordial stone.
The Magician
Smoking the cigarette affected me with its kef, its flame the muse of reverie, an inspiration of the millennium gone; Arabesque domes and minarets of ancient kingdoms I could see, glittering under skylight somewhere afar, beyond the cities, and then beyond the hinterlands where things came to an end. It was maybe that the kef was death, waiting for the glimpse of living men as I, to take as its prize.
I noticed Marco by the pier, convinced that it was the lure of the kef that would always tell me of his coming. Marco was a burly man; his irises were weary and grey; his hair was wiry black and turning white. He had a wicked intelligence about him; and he was a great doer of deeds. He sat on a curbed retainer wall where the street was conjoined to a brick patio by the maritime building, muttering to himself about the cobb that refused to eat his soggy bread.
“If you eat, you will fly,” Marco said to them dotingly, breaking away from his otherwise callous mien.
The place of his lounging lay swelled in shadow as the day diminished. Oft he sat there with a surplus of bread, harnessing an earnest intent to nurture the gulls with a sort of motherly pride. He let this pursuit drive him until twilight claimed its stake of sky. He wore a chef's clothing, apron and all, but I had never seen him in a kitchen. The whereabouts of his employment were unknown to me. I imagined the possibility of him working the line at a different restaurant every day, only to end up feeding his birds when dusk finally came.
As I puffed the cheap cigarette he knew I had come, as I knew it to be. I conceived of Marco and his patience; by this token he allowed me to sit as he fed his children their sopping meal.
“It visits me, now and then,” he began to say on my approach. “When I think alone, it is there: the shores of my village, with the damp autumn sand between the toes of my feet. The first touch that the crème gives, first to my lips, precocious and naïve—the roux then toward the tongue, evolving, still soft, unknown—then the art of its method ascends with an inundating richness to the palate, the final peak, the final roar of its constricted voice…” His eyes were closed as he spoke and he nearly quivered in raptures. “…and all the while the brine that chariots the breeze sticks to your skin, resinous, raw, and dewy. The temperature is harsh and cold, unforgiving, and the lighthouse on the peninsula dims within the misty spectral that has slinked onto the coast without the knowing of the sea. Done by my own hand, this béchamel haunts me as though I am still across the Atlantic waiting for the waves to carry me onward. But—it is good to see you, my friend.”
A sudden frustration arose and he pled furiously, raising his hands to a liable sky. “When will they eat? How will their wings grow strong enough to surpass the ocean's wind?”
Even when the air on the wharf became soft, it was difficult to fathom; nonesuch as now were so fragile and transient an era when spring came to turn and then went, before one could contain its transition.
Marco, slackened, agreed on the short-lived splendor. He had an Italian accent that was almost dead and gone. “You must try to sculpt it for yourself as efficiently as you can—the wind and the sun—before it fades away.”
One of the gulls came close and Marco tried to pat its head. It immediately hopped away, causing him to frown.
“You must capture it quickly, as you can, my true friend, like this petering sun. You can find all that you need in the sunset.” He signaled to the empty lighthouse at the end of the wharf. “When my knees do not ache from the storms—I go there, you see. For I am nearly an old one, now, and there waits some endless deep; the jewel, its sorrows sad, yet sweet.” His gray hair tousled in the ocean breeze and the effect seemed to send him longing for his vision.
I looked out to his quay where the harbor stored its boats. “I am escaping this ocean, Marco, to find the air that will never leave me.”
“They always leave,” Marco replied, looking solemnly upon me for the first time and then staring vacantly at his feathered kin, “and then they always come home.”
A large gathering of the gulls landed to join the others, surrounding him rather suddenly. He reveled in plopping the bread bits to the brick, dancing in the form that he sat with each leg raising in alternative timing like pistons firing for an engine. The ones at the center hoarded the bounty. There were a few of the brigade that fought their way inside to gain their shares, but their success was fleeting. Marco was in consternation as he watched, desperately scattering what remained of the loaf to the outer echelons, but there were still many that had been excluded. He stood up and let the grain escape his fingers like the flailing drops of a tropical storm, disseminating the fragments as equally as could be done. Some still did not eat.
He rose wordlessly and went slowly across the grass to where a beach covered in seaweed and rocks lay before the steady pulse of waves upon the shore. He stood looking to the other side of the bay where bucolic cottages were rooted to the coastline. He did not look back to see if I had followed.
I went to the barroom up the road. It was a king's court, the seat by the tap a gilded throne where men could find ease from their exasperations. Others feasted on their pints, relieved, some smiling—content even if stolidly expressing so on their faces. Numb and indefinite—dreaming, talking, and laughing, they came to understand rest from themselves for a while. I watched them, comprehending what I should be, fighting back the darkness of old rooms that lay heaped in cobweb somewhere in the mind. Perhaps it was auspicious to filter hard weights through religion or success of some kind rather than the vices that maimed your liver along with other useful organs. Yet, it was the contrary of such ideology and the joint that a comate at the bar offered to me that would soon inhere as my solace; if only for a while.
There was a steady tune on the playlist in the background and I was forced to realize an inability to capture these pockets of time. The song progressed, the glasses lifted up from the copper bar-top to quench thirsty mouths, and the moments were elusive, scudding on the threshold of what could be reached by the mind and endured. It seemed a lonely process to view it all escape without a slightest sense of its recovery, gone into an oblivion rendered by a stubborn chronology. Not even the alcohol could give what was linear rounded shape. Existence was as straight as an arrow, not the arcuate bow that projected it forward with compacted, and then released, velocity. The foaming beer that rested atop the counter space could gift merely its haze and unspecific demeanor; how it would appear as if reified into sentiment, a form conceivable to crude man in his simian context. No froth at all could have it hewn into a solid mass for observation or study. We could merely drift alongside the passage, perceiving its tide ebbing and flowing, now and again, like the rocky shore on which Marco stood, and which was rendered unto us to watch and wait on, and at times revere. The beer, the booze, the liqueur were lacking for any of it, yet, cauterized when the salty waves finally sallied the sand and onto the borders of our unhealed wounds.
We smoked the joint just outside, the stranger and I, after I paid the ticket. I went back the way I had come, plodding down the preserved colonial walkways. I took out a flask of middle-shelf whiskey from a pocket and sipped piecemeal, thinking of the way her cool hands once glided along my cheeks when the sun went down and the breeze picked up from the currents. She once understood how the warm months of Salem revived what was scarcely left of me after the brittle drear of colder seasons, but now I let the blade of the whiskey linger on the back of my throat before it gladly entered into the bloodstream.
Back at the landing, where the grass acquiesced into rock-ridden beach and surf, I could see the lighthouse splintering the sunset into blinding flutes of gold. I searched for Marco, but could not find him. The seawater had crept outward. It had carried trinkets of sea-glass and clams aground. As I trekked the strait that led to the lighthouse beyond, the wind was pungent with the water that was purging the bitterness into which it had molded itself for the winter. There were berths on the right side of the wharf once used for docking colonial trading vessels coming back and forth from ports all across the world. Once in a while, a nineteenth-century hull rested its bulk in the harbor, navigated by modern sailors with a historic interest in driving the voyage. They were empty now and the level of the sea exposed the barnacle-teeming surface of the berth bases, which were old and discolored by the brine of ages.
When I reached the end of the quay, the sun was a faint pin-drop in the distance. The lighthouse was tinctured in a faint violet shade. The boats in the harbor had settled unto a gentle cadence of the recycled current. Over the edge of the stone face, the wavy shadows of mirror reflected the faint lights that exuded from the water-side restaurants and boutiques. These specks of brilliance rendered the trembling surface of the water an opal of absorbing kind, assimilating entering matter as a black hole did unto suns.
Then, in an instant, there was animation that had become of the void—a barrage of dance. The motes of elegant flicker like long legs pattering weightlessly on parquet. A flowing silk of pallid colors trailing the consort of light. Hair shone as twisted beams and eyes golden spheres of glistening flower: a woman on the water vaguely existing. As she twirled, the light scattered into discrete membranes until she became undone. She was dissolved, and the black sorrow supplanted her place, the deep prolonging its essence of tunnel-like, perpetual tranquility.
I lit another cigarette, walking back to the mainland, pulling on it harshly. Marco was sitting on his wall, the wind fluffing his weathered, gray bushel. He appeared to be in repose.
“They have left me to sleep,” Marco said to the arriving footsteps. He was staring at his own scuffed shoes, his kin gone to feed at some other shore. “They have left me to dream my sad dream.”
I sat beside him, exhaling the smoke of the kef. He looked to the moon for a reply that I could not give him. I offered the solace of a smoke and he refused it.
“Will you go for a drink?” I asked.
Marco laughed in defeat, shaking his head. “I have tasted all of the bitterness that I can. It has tasted well, but I have had enough of it.”
He got up from where he sat and I wondered if I saw tears in his eyes by the moonlight. He put his hand on my shoulder.
“I am tired, now,” he said, smiling. “I will go to the jewel of the sea.”
I watched him go, taking in a possible mirage from the kef: I saw Marco look back and smile again, but I could not be sure. I hoped. The moonbeams failed to reveal.
A warm breeze came about as soon as he disappeared. It rose sharply and then fell. It was not of the ocean. It was one that told of summer's coming.
After a long spell, Marco never returned.
The Hanged Man
In Santa Fe the heat was a populace. It was not ruled by a terrible sun, but it was forever there, rarely thwarted by clouds in the sky. When one putzed around in the city, it was often in the sun where he was quick to grow heavy and exhausted.
Marie kissed me on the cheek while we lounged uncomfortably on a bench in the plaza. She succeeded with something tenderly professed (perhaps to me) in French, although she knew I could understand nothing of it. I thought, at least, they were lover's words for French could have been sex with the tongue, but perhaps these were not.
“Do you see the man that stands on the ball and juggles?” I asked.
She squinted, shielding her eyes with her hand. The said artiste had a satchel on the ground near his act, entreating for the payments of a day's efforts.
“What do you think of his living?”
“I believe he is happy and nothing more,” she replied.
I lit a cigarette and breathed in deeply. I studied her as she read a periodical. Her lips were full and her smile burgeoned when she discovered me perusing. It was her look alone that I could know; the fiercely quiet eyes of a crude self as she felt the final moments of my entrance, draped under sheet and coverlet.
“I wish for his happiness,” I said. “It is unspoiled by the false pride of life's other victories.”
Marie lifted up the paper, unimpressed. “Then go juggle in the street.”
When the sun began to set, we walked up San Francisco Street toward the basilica. The light had taken to the hue of the imitation adobe that was the ubiquitous exterior of the downtown. The locals had begun to accumulate for the celebration. The native vendors who had spread out their wares for a day of selling alongside the Governor's Mansion were packing up their goods to return home. Donned in invasive clusters of turquoise, the retired women who roamed the sidewalks were transmutations of traditional lifetimes, reborn somehow as second-life artists in a time and place (and city) where leftover cold cuts rotting under the sun could be regarded as masterpiece and set in a gallery.
We made our way to where the statue of Assisi stood tall and charismatic with a wolf by his side. He was sainted in heavy bronze, welcoming wayfarers with an unclasped hand. A masoned concourse of pieced stonework spread before the grand wooden entrance of his sanctuary, lined with benches and condensed shrubs. Tracts of grass coursed leftward of the church. One was penned in wrought-iron gating, an archway providing entrance. Within, a slab of carved stone was a crux bronzed in onlay. Atop the gate, it stated, Dios Da y Dios Quita.
Inside the church's anteroom there were books of religious analysis and contemporary omnibuses of Catholic essay spread over wooden shelving. A video focusing on a subject utterly nebulous looped continuously on a Magnavox in the corner of the room. We went through the main doors into the narthex where few people were visiting. The stages of the cross were depicted along both walls of the nave as frescoes pieced within meekly-lusted stain glass. One piece of a local artisan's work overwhelmingly adorned the space above the lectern: it was a modern sculpture of the crucified Christ with its texture dripping globules of bronze, eerily fictional in its exaggerated portrayal. It clashed haughtily with the traditional visage of a peacefully expiring savior.
A female pedestrian viewing the apse gawked admonishingly from a distance as Marie kissed me. We found worth in ourselves, continuing to share lips.
When we left the cathedral there was a man who stood by easel and canvas on the rectangle of engirded green close by. He stood to the left of the stone crux, the gate loosely open behind him. The artist worked slowly but emphatically; once aligned, his strokes dashed as though they were wisps of lightning. He calculated again and then swept with the brush. He was maestro conducting animato to his orchestra and a fencer foining his opponent after a series of skilled thrusts. I desired to think that these were quiet feelings which had been locked up in his daily routines, shouting their fiery breath for all men to see.
During a moment of pause he discerned, through the sudden jungle of generic, unlabeled baseball caps, the digital cameras dangling by lanyard, and the bright blue fanny packs, and gestured with his fingers for me to come closer. Marie stood by the effigy of St. Francis as I whidded through the obstacles to reach him.
He shook my hand and welcomed me with broken English. He bent down and brought up a sip from a bottle in a brown paper bag. He offered me a swig—I took it. He whispered, “I have not taken drink in quite a time.”
He pointed to his painting. “Do you see it? It is the look in her eyes that I always remember. Once I can capture her eyes, the rest of the painting is clear.”
The woman with Moorish features wore a glistering red dress on his canvas. Her eyes were midnight black and the rose resting gently in her hair summoned a lambent brightness unto her tan complexion. She sat on a wooden bench with her back to the world of the observer; her head turned glancing over her shoulder with a burning stare of essence at the painter as he touched to her with brush.
“How do you take what is and make it your own?”
“I do not.” He sparked into sudden laughter. “Do you not paint your beautiful princesses in your mind, too, my young friend? You must—since you escape your demise.”
The painter would complete this piece another day. He explained that he had not painted on canvas in a very long time. The bags under his eyes sagged like tiny pouches and his curly mop of hair was sprinkled with snow-gray. He was the great painter, come and gone. He gleaned his supplies and implements in short time, and then departed.
When we were in the street, the cheers of the Fiesta-goers funneled into the air. One could see a marching troop of men garbed in the uniforms and morions of the Spanish Conquistadors. “Viva la Fiesta!” they cried. The Spanish court consisting of King, Queen, and princes and princesses alike, modeled in elegant attire on a stage in the plaza's heart, preparing for acknowledgement through ceremony and from the crescendos of the adoring crowd.
We ducked into the lounge past the impassable crusade of parading members. I ordered and sipped on a draught of Guiness far too slowly. I listened as Marie spoke of Provence—her childhood trips to the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Sénanque enclosed in its secluded glen by the Vaucluse Mountains, the rows of lavender serving as sentinels of the sanctum in countless number. From another life and place. And then others that were known trailed into the lounge, cavorting in the aftermath of the burning puppet at Zozobra—still drunk, maybe still high from the nights before. They beamed and consumed and were all raconteurs. They bellowed out their laughter after a good punch-line. They seemed to borrow lives predicted as short.
Outside the sky surrendered to dark and the crowd was dwindled, but still ever so alive. The juggler had started performing again with the formal processions finished. He balanced atop a large rubber ball to add to the suspense. Some people fed his satchel while many ignored. Marie smoked her cigarettes and I watched her from the window, from a place where I could almost capture what she was. Glimpses of orange glow explained where she had come from. Where she and maybe all of us had started. Lifetimes were succinct in such dusking light. Beginnings came together elaborately where they had only been disparate fragments before. It could've been just enough.
‘It's in front of you, dipshit, and you don't even know it,' she said to me through some far off plane as I watched her through the window. ‘It's in front of you,' she deigned—it was the way she held her cigarette.
I took down an ending shot of liquor, then left Marie to herself. The streets had cleared when I hit them, the spectators resorting to the bars and lounges when they didn't want home.
At the parking garage across the Lensic, a man was slumped against the wall, a few nicks on his head, a few scratches on his arms and a few teeth in his mouth. He moaned and squirmed next to an upright walker. Another man in glasses was standing by. He said he knew the guy. He said this was usual.
“He says he can't get up.” The man with the glasses put his hand on his chin. “He can.”
The drunken man was not involved when I helped him to the bench nearby. I earned tinges of his blood on my shirt. When we made it, he looked at me he had the eyes of a child and I wondered who he was and who he had been—when they would dig his grave. A police cruiser showed up and the officer knew him by name. They went in small steps toward the back seat.
The kitchen was cold when I returned home. The windows could no longer remain open. I got into the shower to brush off the feeling. The steam was a touch of relief, but when I got out, the heater wouldn't kick on and there were no clean clothes in the closet.
I stood naked by the countertop. There was some whiskey left out to drink. There was a book or two stacked next to a pile of receipts. There was a bottle of aspirin.
There was time in a bottle of pills. Slowed, dimmed time that sinuated—that gave hope for small moments. There was a stillness, like the ocean in the eye of a storm, where one could finally see it all—pooling, eddying—quietly hanging on by a shred of some volition. Everything. Everything wrapped into a tight bundle that could fit in the palm of a hand. All the tales waiting, all the epic stories wishing to be sung. One could finally capture them, wield them, carry them somewhere and make them glow. A dancer on the water in a dream on a string, waiting. It could almost be enough.
There was time in a bottle of pills.
I poured the whiskey into a glass. I went into the other room and found a pen to write.