Do Us Part.

And then he came back. When she answered the door, her skin was still so tight from crying that her face felt too small for her head; she hadn't been out of bed in a week, and she had thought that the knock would be another fucking pound cake from some family member who had been out of town for calling hours. But it was him. The elbows on his suitjacket were down to the threads, and you could see little windows of bone along his forehead and knuckles and upper lip. But still, he was there.

At first, she didn't really question it. They made pizza rolls, sat on the loveseat and watched that Ninja Warrior show he'd always liked. After about an hour, she asked him how he'd been, and he sort of laughed--there was a gap in the trachea, so the sound was something between a wheeze and a german consonant--and started looking around for a notepad. Enough about me, babe, let's talk about you.

Every morning, she made his coffee like she used to (Maxwell brand slow roasted, honey instead of sugar) and he packed his briefcase and snuck out the back door, then under the gap in the fence. She wasn't quite sure where he went; his old boss sent her a condolences card with a lecherous post script, so she knew he wasn't going back to the plant. She clandestinely checked the corners of his mouth for blood when he came home, but there was never anything beyond a crescent of dirt under each of his fingernails, a missing shoe now and then.

Besides this, nothing was all that different. At night, he curled next to her her the way he always had, his arms twisted around her torso like some kind of human Möbius strip. He still refused to talk about kids, but when Drew Barrymore came onscreen during ET, he went kind of soft in the eyes. All in all, they were as happy as they'd ever been, maybe more. Instead of going to Louie's with his brother every friday, he stayed in with her and played Scrabble with all the E's taken out.

But after a few weeks, something was different. The wound along his ribs began to creep apart like a spreading stain, the mortician's stitches splitting and fraying as the hole reopened bloodlessly. He tried to shower, and immediately they realized that it had been a mistake; the embalming fluid stained the tub green, and he started to look a little like Kitty Carlisle after a bad night. She told him it was okay, that she didn't care, and she held her breath defiantly when she kissed him despite the smell. She slid him a note between the candlesticks on the dinner table: I love you no matter what. You were gone, and now you're here, and of course I wouldn't expect you to come back the same as you left.

He wrote her back a few days later, on a post-it which he left on the kitchen door above a pair of muddy footprints and a chunk of hair on the linoleum. I'm sorry, it said. But let's not shit ourselves here. Please, for your own sake, don't forgive me.



(zombie spiderman from http://www.marvel.com/news/comicstories.647).

#1 (Gonna start numbering one's I'm too lazy to title, tough!)

Sometimes, I like to think about Immanuel Kant going to the doctor's office, of the sweat in tiny stars along his giant forehead as the doctor presses a stethoscope to the pale swell of his chest. My fantasies about Pascal are slightly sexier; he is usually eating an enormous grapefruit in his underwear, usually around four in the morning, while his valet is still asleep. David Hume is obviously walking next to a lake, but I mostly imagine the moment when he stops thinking about The Treatise on Human Nature and realizes he has to piss. In my head, he has very delicate hands, and hooks two fingers around his belt buckle and thinks on it hard.

I don't allow myself to think about Kierkegaard much, because when I do he's usually naked and that's just so damn obvious. When I think about Montaigne, I just get ridiculous; I imagine the two of us under his fleur-de-lis patterned canopy bed, daring eachother to hold our breath until we black out, whispering to eachother when we come to: What did you see? I saw a lot of colors, and Macchu Picchu I think.

Mantua.

Note #1: I started this at ARTSweek when I was eighteen years old and literally finished it this morning. It might be a little schizophrenic/way outside my current subject matter.

Note #2: It's pronounced Man-away, for the un-ohio initiated.

Note #3: Oh yeah, this one's long.


She had locked the whole house from the inside, snatched the spare key from under the mosquito coil on the back porch and released Bob Barker, her 80 year-old parrot, in the middle of the kitchen. Gary groped ass-up underneath the neighbors' hedges for an hour before he found the garden shears. Stabbing his way through the screen door, he almost wished he hadn’t found them at all: Bob Barker had picked up Carlotta’s nicknames for him over the years, and now the parrot was calling him a dickslap through the wire.

When he finally hacked his way into the house, the bird was squawking about Gary’s impotency and circling the lazy Susan. The contents of the spice rack were thrown into the bottom of a box along with the cutlery drawer and a sweating package of lunchmeat. Gary was silent as he nudged his way past the ransacked pantry and eased open the refrigerator. A bottle of mustard and three restaurant mints were the only survivors, shoved into the shadowed corner of the produce door. He thought of Carlotta, sitting in her locked bathroom aggressively filing her nails like a sniper swabbing her gun barrels. The mints were out: she would hear the wrapper crackling from a mile away.

Tiptoeing as best he could in CAT boots, Gary slid a chair back from the kitchen table and sat opposite Bob Barker. For a moment, the parrot simply cocked his blue head and stared Gary down, perched regally on the ceramic basset hound that served as a centerpiece. The bird’s solid black eyes were glossy and unblinking, daring him to defend himself. A long silence, and Gary reached cautiously for the stray dish of Gummi Bears Carlotta must have missed, set, cruelly, next to Bob Barker’s scaly right talon.

“Limp dick.”

It took him a moment to realize that the parrot hadn’t spoken. It imitated Carlotta’s voice so note for note that it was only when he registered the sound of bamboo mules on the linoleum that he realized she was there at all. The chair legs, he thought, but when he asked her how she had known he was there, she replied, “The whole goddamn city of Ashtabula can hear your stomach growling.” Then muttered: “Inconsiderate fuck.”

She ambled into his line of vision, her hands gripped hard against her hips and her hooked arms forming windows around two refrigerator magnets shaped like California raisins. “Would you like something to eat, honey?” she said, and gave a ringmaster’s swoop of the arms. “Let me show you our buffet. Let’s see here, we have a lovely selection of international spices…here’s some…canola oil…oh!” She flung open the refrigerator door. “Big spender’s upgraded from store brand mustard! Throw some garlic on this, we could feed a family of four.”

Gary kept his eyes on the plastic fish beaded around her ankle. “How’s moving out going, Car.”

Carlotta’s mouth clapped shut like an oyster shell. Bob Barker flailed his wings slightly and squawked “Nancy boy” on her behalf.

Gary sighed and rolled his head forward against his chest. He had spent the past nine hours flagging in red eyes on the Delta concourse, and his teeth were still grinding from the Mini-Thins. On the other side of his closed eyelids, Carlotta was stalking the room, and now the thump of her shoes was escalating into a cacophony of slammed silverware, scattering clove sprigs, her cherished Bahama wind chimes being ripped down. It had become an almost comfortingly familiar sound over the six months since Carlotta had started the process of leaving him, comforting in that it never ended her with leaving. Sometimes, she would go silent and stroke Bob Barker like an Egyptian queen while he begged her to stay. Sometimes, she would make love to him in the wreckage of her again unpacked boxes, rolling off the war casualty of a crushed Hummel figurine when they were done to tell him he disgusted her. But by the volume of crashing gravy boats, scattered beans and plywood cabinets being obliterated by a bamboo toe, he knew that wouldn’t happen tonight. It was the first time her rampage was loud enough to silence even Bob Barker. It was the first time he had ever mentioned her leaving without the words “don’t go.”

When he opened his eyes, Carlotta was already staring at him, the second of two mustard jars aimed squarely at his Adam’s apple. Gary shoved his chair back a foot.

“Lotta baby, it was just a question!”

Carlotta lowered the jar and gave him a “well isn’t that some shit” purse of the lips. “A question,” she said. “You can’t even feed us, you apparently killed a man with a pair of garden shears and now you try to kick me out of my own goddamn house when I clearly have no intention of leaving?”

As she spoke, she twisted the cap off the mustard and plunged four fingers in, slurped them clean. Her teeth still dripping orange, she oozed out the words: “We’ll I’m not leaving, Gary. You have an obligation to me now. You have an obligation to feed me more than goddamn mustard from now on.”

*******************

She bought the parrot from an estate sale out in Shaker Heights, the week after her one and only bonus from the DMV. It was an electrical fire; one of the old moneys had thought to make Sanka during a lightning storm, and had plugged the percolator in just as a power surge leapt through the wires. Janet MacAllister-Black had probably never imagined her picture appearing in the Star—or at least, not a picture of herself as a charred ink smear under the caption OLD WOMAN SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTS!!! CONSPIRACY??? She had probably never imagined her restored Victorian would be auctioned off to a strip mall developer instead of the Western Reserve Historical Society; she had certainly never envisioned her family bibles, her vibrating torso trimmer and one fifteenth of her exotic bird collection being sold to a woman like Carlotta.

For weeks, Carlotta spent every night in the middle of the living room gold-leafing a wire cage she had found at a consignment shop. “This bird has dignity,” she had told Gary when she first unbuckled the hole-studded air purifier box that contained Bob Barker from the passenger’s seat of her Dodge Omni. “I won’t say that’s the only thing we’re lacking around here, but it’s sure as hell one thing.”

She worked on the cage after dinner in front Nick at Nite, the room dark and her hands blue from the glow of the TV. Bob Barker watched from the corner—or, not exactly watched, but rather, shat uncontrollably and knocked his head against the yellow tarp that Carlotta had used to roof one of her niece’s playpens. He didn’t talk for the first three days, but when he did, it was to quote something neither Carlotta nor Gary could identify; a panicked rendition of W.H. Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats.

Gary tried to like the bird. His arrival had signaled Carlotta’s first unexplained return after her first dramatically announced departure—a shouting match over her purchase of an aboveground pool (“It’s just a basic mod con, Gary. Do I not deserve the basic mod cons?!”) and a deafening exit, burned rubber and the bass turned up on a Tina Turner cassette. She hadn’t explained why she had come back or where she had gone, though Gary could picture her losing the cash she’d crammed into her gold lamé fanny pack in a Detroit casino and being ejected from a five star hotel she could never afford. She had spent most of her money and stolen almost a fourth of his yearly salary that week alone. He imagined her teased strawberry head bent over a craps table, her lime green nails fanning out towards the arc of the falling dice. It made his jaw tighten and a small vein along his temple tremble in a way that he was sure portended a stroke.

Still, after the first few days she was gone, the house got too quiet. Besides the TV, which he kept on all day, there was only the lonely clatter when he tripped on one of her potted cactuses, or fitness videos, or stuffed animals, or whatever else. It made something shift in his stomach that he couldn’t think about or name. The truth was, he didn’t know how to miss her, and when she came back, the feeling rushed out into his capillaries and stayed, a dull churning at the extremities of him.

She probably wanted him to plead with her, but Gary couldn’t bring himself to say much more than four words to Carlotta: Lean cuisine tonight okay? It was as if, when she left, she had planted an elaborate map of mines around the house, and any stray word or interrupted silence would turn the place inside out. Normally, he slept through the morning and afternoon in preparation for the night shift, but when she started to train Bob Barker to say proverbs, he found himself laying awake listening to the theatrical crescendos of her voice arcing through the wall. She still slept in his bed, but only when he was not in it; when he slid in at 6 in the morning, she neatly exited to the kitchen, where she began making her morning omelet and belting out Paradise City, or Whitney Houston’s Exhale, or one of her other favorites.

After a while, Gary began finding specks of gold leaf crushed into the welcome mat, sprinkled on the shoulders of his work jumpsuit like dandruff, floating along the swirl of pet milk in his coffee. Bob Barker had taken residence in his cage, but hadn’t taken to it; dull steel showed through in the places where the parrot had skinned them of their coating and the artificial flowers festooning the base were now covered in a thick layer of crap and bird spit. With the cage completed, Carlotta began her hesitant return to their shared bedroom and dinner table. At first, she ate the most efficient meals she could put together; dry Lucky Charms, Slimfast bars, raw baloney. When she finally worked her way up to microwave linguine, Gary risked talking to her.

“Goin’ to work tomorrow?” he said.

“The least you could have done was marry me in a church,” she said.

It was around this time that Bob Barker began to forget the “but-seek-first-His-kingdom-and-His-righteousness-and-all-these-things-will-be-given-to-you-as-well”s that Carlotta had so painstakingly taught him, favoring instead Carlotta’s own colorful vocabulary. She left again on the fourth of July, 1997; again, Christmas of the same year; an unspecific day, 1998, after Gary informed her that he was trying to sleep, and could she stop yelling along with the televangelist about the glorious splendor of God’s heaven.

He learned how to recognize the moments before she left, like an arthritic man feels the rain pulling at his hip joint or a Cherokee hears the tremors of a pissed-off bison stampede. As Carlotta flung the mustard jar against the table top, he could almost smell her leaving; the Sally’s Beauty brand mouse melting into the sweat along her hairline, the metallic twinge on her breath of someone who’s just sprinted a mile and is ready to spit blood. He had learned to expect the clumsy knocking of her walking too fast in heels, the suitcases as they slid off the top shelf of the hall closet and dented the floor, and her final words to him, normally along the lines of “where in hell is my damn beaver coat?” Next, she would wipe out the statues on the mantle with one swinging arm, then nudge the overpacked suitcase towards the door with both hands and both knees.

Each time, somehow, it got easier. He even had a routine. He would move to the basement stairwell where he could sit and watch, maybe counter an epithet with a “don’t say that,” though maybe not. He would wait until her taillights shrunk and finally dimmed into the darkness at the end of the road, and then he would walk down the stairs, put 40 lbs on each end of the barbell and lift and lift, until he couldn’t remember marking time any other way.

But always, 200 reps in or so, he would hear her voice. It would be a sweet thing, more musical than he was used to: Honeypie or Lovebird. Every time, there was a prick along his spine as he sat up a little, listening to Bob Barker sing out the nicknames that Carlotta had made up not for Gary, but for the parrot: their own odd breed of lovers’ Marco Polo. He’d like to say he knew it wasn’t her every time; he’d like to say that maybe these moments were why she always seemed to forget the parrot, though he knew it was more likely that she was in too much of a hurry to get out. He would wait, and watch the bird waft down the stairs and land on the end of the weight stand like a fluorescent blue specter of death. Then he would start lifting again, until his arms fell back limp, until the calluses on the heels of his hands buzzed with pain.

He was ready for it, for her to change her mind—his hands twitched into a fist, his fingernails searching for his palms. Carlotta stomped past him, futilely kicking at the loose doorframe as she rounded the corner out of the room. But the sounds that usually followed this—an inhumanly loud yowl, the shaking echo of the screen door jangling closed—these sounds did not come. Instead, he heard a set of slow, shifting feet, then the click of the upstairs TV dial as the volume swelled to an unmistakable 10. It was loud enough that Gary could distinctly hear Marie Osmond detailing the quality of a doll’s hand-made undergarments on the Home Shopping Network. It was not loud enough that he could not hear the sudden, bright gasps of Carlotta’s breath, the half-swallowed yelps of her crying. Her words were carved into the air she'd put between, a distinct and cursive void: I clearly have no intention of leaving.

Bob Barker hadn’t moved. One glassy black eye was set into his profile like a button ready to be pressed, and as he looked at Gary, it betrayed no secret thoughts. Gary slowly dragged his hand through the pile of uncooked rice she had thrown on the table, listening to the sound it made. There was a pulse of wind as the bird beat its wings and a few of the grains shivered off the tabletop. Other than that, there were all the same sounds, the kind of sounds that amount ultimately to white noise, the kind of white noise that turns to silence, the kind of silence that can kill a man if he’s not careful, if he doesn’t speak.

“If you come back,” he said. “Tell her I’m sorry. If you come back, tell her I knew about the baby, I saw the test in the trash, and that there’s $700 in a box in the crawlspace but that’s all I’ve got. I’m gonna stay until you come back, I want to, but if you can’t stay gone, I figure I’ve got to start believing in signs.” He paused, eased the window open. “But think about staying gone.”

Our Words Were Told, Our Songs Were Sung

We were pretty much knotted together in the womb, but my twin sister and I have never had the same dreams. Hers are like acid trips or hyper-real arthouse films, and usually at the end of them she watches herself die some blissful, technicolor death, or else crawls up through a hole in into her own bed and watches herself wake before waking acutally. I have dreams about ordinary things. Really ordinary things: last night, my friends and I had lunch at Arby's and talked about the election.

You'd think there'd be some communal wavelength between our brain patterns, like in those pop neuroscience articles or on the Disney Channel. Our fucking freckles match--you'd think I'd have at least a dose of whatever psychotropic fluid she managed to absorb there in the womb. But it has always been this way. She always had to take the bottom bunk growing up because she would sob in her sleep, would twist herself up in her Green Lantern sheets and writhe out of bed because she'd dreamed she was trapped in a cocoon of lava at the center of the goddamned earth. Meanwhile, I wake up every morning and wash my hair, after just dreaming of washing my hair, in perfect soundless black and white. Is it so weird of me that I envy her: that I think of sleep as a narrowing tunnel, and sometimes I wish there were something bright and shifting at the end of it, something terrifying, to give me pause?

Hey dudes, I wrote a one-sentence story and can't think of a title for it.

I have to admit--the night after you broke my heart, I lay awake chewing my lip and waiting for the numbers on my clock to fold into 12:00, waiting for you to run into my room and throw a handful of confetti up into the dark and yell "opposite day!", dive into my bed like a still and patient ocean.

A Reunion.

I put an ad on Craigslist once to find someone to spend Thanksgiving with me. I asked for overbearing women around age fifty, younger if theatrical makeup was employed. The pay was nothing, but I said I'd furnish her with an appropriately heinous lamé patterened sweater and all the pots in the kitchen she had use for.

Fathers had a height requirement. I said I preferred beards but since I've always been a daddy's girl, I forgave the applicants that emailed me photos of themselves with handlebar moustaches, or the fourteen year olds that stood there in cartoon ties, whose cheeks were so smooth they clearly hadn't gone through puberty yet.

We needed at least two sisters, and I wanted them to be sisters in real life, but I would cast anyone provided that there was sufficient dramatic tension between them over a shared ex-boyfriend or something to that effect. "During dinner," I wrote, "one of you can even throw a glass of wine in my face and storm off to buy cigarettes. After we've forgiven eachother, we'll hug eachother on the couch and watch Romy and Michelle's."

I didn't want any brothers, but I got a pleading letter from a man who had only been out of the shelter for a month, so I hired him and one of the smaller blond sister-applicants to play his new wife.

I avoided boyfriend applicants for myself to minimize the perverts, though I wanted one desperately. And even though no one wanted to be my grandfather, (I have to say I took this personally), the family photo turned out great; I put the dog in the empty chair, in a tie, and when the automatic flash blinked on, even he smiled.

And while not everyone stayed the whole time, and we had to prop up a stuffed cat in our mother's chair to stand in when she ran out crying and called us all whores--even so, I will never regret this. For at least a moment, we sat down together, and said the world "grace" out loud and were none of us ashamed.

Evidence.

For a long time she thought of death in the singular, as one huge black wall she knew she would run into as soon as she made it to the other side of this room. On superstitious days, the wall was actually a curtain, a dark looking glass cloaking paradise; when she was bitter and thought she'd gotten a bad shake out of the first 20 years of life, it was a revolving door. 90% of the time, it was just a wall, and when she finally reached it there would be an impact, and for a moment her head would ring with unfamiliar voices from the blow. And then it would stop that.

But then she starts considering the evidence. Then she starts reading Hume and drinking whiskey with dinner, and she knows she has no way to prove any of it. If science can say that every year the earth tilts so many inches sunward, that it has always been this way-- if she has been alive for so many thousands of hours, and it has always been this way, then who are they to say? If she has never forgotten anyone she has ever loved, if this certain chord can induce time travel, cast her back five years in memory, who are they to say that anything has ended?

The Upper Airs.

Every time I stop believing in God, I start thinking about planes. Not the planes themselves--I think about the windows, about being in the mouth of a cloud, staring into solid white. They're not so different, God and this place; they are the only things I can think of that dissolve even the idea of space, that have no walls, that contain nothing. Nothing, not even I can interrupt it by moving, signalling time. If I yelled your name out to either, my voice would never come back to me; it would shatter, or else be swallowed.

In this place, in this plane, in my thoughts of God, I know, if nothing else, that I am displaced. At best, I am only visiting. If I were to breathe even a sip of what's out there, I would drown. If I stabbed my way through this window, stopped this small heart, I would be gone, inhaled like pale smoke.

Five Secrets and Two Lies I Have to Tell About Love.

1. When I was seven, a girl named Joey at my all-girls elementary school convinced the class that her peter pan haircut wasn't her mother's idea of a cruel joke, and that she wouldn't change in the same room as us in gym class because she was actually a boy and the all-boy's school hadn't had room for her. I, of course, wrote her a love letter. Even now, when I see her at the mall selling Armani in a miniskirt, I am convinced that this explains everything.

2. You broke my heart three days ago. I haven't eaten since. Whiskey, yes; half a pear once, but I felt like I was cheating myself of something.

3. I know that my sister is gay. She grew up on the other side of Lake Erie and I've only seen her maybe fifteen times in my entire life, but I can still feel things like this, in the thrum of our shared blood. She makes loud, pointed references to future children and husbands at family weddings, but I saw the way she looked at her Chinese roommate that time I visited her at college, and I had this itch in my palm that I didn't understand, that I know now was because I wanted to touch her somewhere I wouldn't be allowed to, her face, her wrist.

4. When I lost my virginity, we were watching White Men Can't Jump on the paisley couch in your parent's basement. It occurs to me now that I should be more careful about these things.

5. When you told me that you've always wanted to kiss someone all the way up a spiral staircase, I thought you were stupid.

6. I always say that it never gets easier, losing faith in you or whatever version of you is around at the moment. I am lying when I say this. It gets so much easier, and afterwards, I love worse every time.

7. When people I know vaguely die tragic deaths, and I tell people about it, I usually say they were my friends. I don't feel so guilty about this; I like to think that you're okay with the fact that I never really liked you until a semi bent your Corolla into an inarticulate U, that you're happy to have me around now.

A Valentine.

I say, close your eyes and think about all the pain you have ever felt in your life. I don't mean papercut pain or tongue burn pain, but the kind of pain that has a color, and sometimes, its own dimensons, huge and growing dimensions like a new room opening inside your body, a void unfolding like reverse origami.

I'll give you an example, I say.

Once, I had my wisdom teeth removed, and the doctor didn't use any anethesia. Their was novicaine, but the stab in my gums hurt more than the ensuing numbness numbed anything, and when he cut into me all my bones shifted like fast-motion plate tectonics and I knew that was my body's sign language for pain. It was a pain that made my vision shake, it smelled like walking out into an incredibly white and empty day.

Are you listening? Because I have more. Like this other time, I went to Spain. I mean, I moved to Spain, for no ostensible reason--I slept in a low-ceilinged room on a mattress that was all steel coils and every day, I rode the metro around in circles and waited for rush hour when all the strangers would be packed together into the car and forced to touch me. I spoke the language, but no one spoke to me, and after a while not using my mouth I became convinced that I didn't have one anymore, that I was only transparent skin with nerves pulsing light and a swimming, bloodless brain. I was silent, but that pain had a sound. It seared across my skin and vibrated hard, the way I imagine a bomb has to sound before it turns you into light.

Keep your eyes closed. Not just them, close your skin up too, close your ears and be an echoing chamber, just for a minute, for me. Can you imagine what it is like, for me? Can you imagine the sound, the shake, what it tastes like to lose you?

U and Me.

We just can't say it. I'd say that there's a wall between us, but that's not quite it-- its more like an electrified fence, an easy climb, though even the slightest sense of reason or self-preservation would steer you to avoid it. Instead, we lay in the dark and say we love Uganda, and universal healthcare, and ukeleles. I don't say unicorns, because that's a given, and the only things I have left to tell you now are secrets. So I say, I love ubiquity.
Euphoniums.
Yugoslavia. Ukraine. Yucatan Peninsula.
Unicycles.
Unitarians.
Uranium.
Pretty soon, you're cheating. You say you love U locks on bicycles and YouTube and pretty soon, just words that start with U but don't even count (Youuueurope). I have more--I speak four languages, and can love you in just as many--but as soon as I whisper it in the dark, I love unanimous victory, I know that you have conceded. I say Roll over, stop touching you. I am barely lying when I whisper I love euthanasia, ask you to let me sleep.

Twos.

Lately, it seems like there is no one on the streets alone at night. To be honest, it has me unsettled. Human beings used to come in ones, not in matched sets like place settings or, in dire situations, like pedigreed dogs and their eerily resemblant owners. Now, they come paired, locked together at the palms like Siamese Twins. Everywhere I go now, I see double.

There's a couple that seems to always be buying Vienna sausage at my bodega, and this couple, they have the most beautiful hair. Their faces leave something to be desired--dental hygeine, basic symmetry--but their hair is the kind that I imagine alopecian billionaires vie for. I wonder if it's how they found eachother, as if love were so much more obvious than how I've always pictured it, a constant sonar sent out into a helplessly immense ocean. Now, when I see eight year olds on matched bicycles, and I get immediately jealous. I see coy men in cocktail dresses whispering to eachother in a sunned alleyway, their faces mirrored jacks of hearts, and by then I cannot help it. I want to put on a man's clothes and stand by my favorite lake and sing and sing my favorite songs until you come, perfect you, a delayed echo of my own voice.