Monday, February 04, 2008

  • every minute from this minute now

    I LOVE YOUR SIGNATURE, she had said.  It’s curvy.  It’s curly.  It’s expressive, she had said.  That was all before little Jimmy Hearst got his stomach pumped after drinking too much tincture, before my uncle’s lifelong partner and consort accidentally rammed her car halfway into the backyard of the house on the corner of Second Avenue, and right about the time after my fat friend Bill jumped out of his seventeenth-story window leaving for work after developing a sudden fear for elevators and narrow staircases, and lived to tell about it, getting up from the fall none the least bit shaken, instead exclaiming hurrah hurrah gravity is not king. 

    An uneventful life is unknown to me, I had told my father on the telephone while I was nursing the burn wounds of Pup, my Doberman, the ones it got after it decided to jump on the stove.  Do be careful, the storm’s coming in tonight, it’ll be wet it’ll be slippery, my father had said.  Worry not, I had answered unperturbed, for that’s what galoshes and ponchos and blow dryers are for.  And we had hung up.  That was when she came pounding on my door after driving six hours from Nowheresville.  I got your letter, she panted through the door.  I love your signature, she said.  It’s curvy.  It’s curly.  It’s expressive, she said.  I haven’t slept a wink since you’ve been gone, she wheezed.   And I had imagined her behind there, excitable, gasping blue-faced.  From a lack of oxygen, I would have pointed out.  But then she had skittered down and out, gone forever before I could say anything. 

    I had found myself drowsy in the easy chair afterwards, awoken the next morning in daylight by the meteorologist on the radio squawking it’s wet outside, a little slippery, it rained overnight and a cold front moved in from the west so do be careful, and also by thoughts of the wayward girl who whimpered for me through the closed door, the one who used to tear clothes off of herself and cry liberation when she was feisty, never one to say get your filthy maws off me, not even when she looked like a mess at three or four in the morning when she would be all petered out from wrecking her mind in enthusiasm during the day, how I have none of this anymore because she pleaded for me to stay while I begged for her to go, back when water from the overnight storms still leaked from our patched ceiling as we had breakfast in bed with the curtains open, and we were fine with that.

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