Diseased

 

A thief

this disruptor

killer of tomorrow

predator on velvet

slippers

until the roar

the sudden loss

and then distortion

words become memories

soaked in sorrow

yesterday’s joy felt

a lifetime too

late

Defeat

 

It wasn’t only Bryan’s life that seemed charmed. Julia, still in the throes of love with her first appropriate man, got promoted at Marquette. Melissa announced she was pregnant again (her first baby, a girl, couldn’t have been cuter), and Bob still seemed utterly smitten with Shelly. It seemed to me that some formal engagement between Bob and Shelly couldn’t be far behind.

Yet when I mentioned this to Bryan, he replied, “I don’t think so. She was never as serious as Bob was, and Ted said she rarely goes out with all of them anymore. I’m not sure that relationship is going to have a happy ending.”

“You just don’t like her.” 

Bryan grimaced. "No, I don't, but this isn't about that. I just have a feeling it will all be over soon.”

I hoped he was wrong. The last thing Bob needed was another broken heart.

I hoped in vain. The weekend after exams Bryan joined me in the kitchen, where I was peeling an apple. “I have some bad news,” he said. “I just got off the phone with Bob. He and Shelly broke up.”

The apple landed with a thud on the cutting board. “Why?” I demanded.

“You know how Shelly started that new job a few months ago?”

“What about it?”

“She met someone there.”

“You mean another guy?”

When Bryan nodded, I protested, “Is Bob sure about that? Maybe he’s just being paranoid, because of Cathy.”  

“Well, considering the fact that Shelly was the one to tell him, he’s pretty damn certain.”

“She told him?”

“She had to. She and this other guy are moving in together.”

I sank against the counter. First Cathy, and now Shelly. The nightmare never ended. “Is he okay?”

“Not at all, so I invited him to spend a few days with us—I didn’t think you would mind. He could use some cheering up.”

“Of course that’s okay,” I answered, but it was going to take a lot more than a few days with sympathetic friends to right what Shelly had wronged. Bob was a disaster. Not even Cathy dumping him for a stinky old college professor had hurt him this much, I guess because he’d blamed it on his drinking. Now that he was sober, and working his program with such earnestness, maybe his world view had changed. Maybe he had thought to himself, This time things will be different.

And yet here we were again.

As Bob slumped in the dining room chair, looking aged and defeated, I told him, “There will be someone else—someone who will treasure all of the wonderful things about you.”

Bob smiled a little. He clearly did not believe me.

“It’s true,” I insisted, but when his puppy dog eyes brimmed with tears I could have sworn I heard his heart breaking. “I appreciate what you’re trying to say,” he answered. “I really do. But my whole life I’ve been taken advantage of by the people I most want to trust. And the scariest thing is, I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know how to change.”

*From The Happy Ending, a manuscript I'm currently editing

Over

Here in this leaving

triumph is fleeting

from so far away

no tongues left to 

speak in

Revisited

 

Despair rose up in me like a flash flood; it had almost reached my heart when I heard a gentle snorting noise.  The small puffy dog who smelled like cake shuffled out from behind a bush.  “Are you real?” I asked her.  “Or are you going to disappear, too?”

She cocked her head and bared crooked teeth at me, as if to say, Does it matter?

I dropped down next to her.  When I wrapped my arms around my knees and began to cry, she butted her head against my leg until I  unfurled. The setting sun was hot on my neck.  “You shouldn't be here,” I told her.  “You should go back into the woods, where it’s cool.”

She snorted and rolled onto her back. 

Tiredly I slid over to the shaded area and laid down on the damp, cold ground.  As I closed my eyes I heard some more snuffling sounds; I then felt her strange fluffy head rest against the palm of my hand. We will be safe tonight, I thought to myself. Tomorrow was anybody’s guess.  

Ask Me Why

 

I pushed the river

found a way over and under

forced the square peg through

the round hole

gave hosannas to snowdrops

breathed in the scent of new

meadows

made vows behind half-closed

doors

 

yet even as I crept into summer

felt the cool pavement under a 

welcome shadow

listened in the mountains to

the coyotes sing

the synapses kept firing 

corrupted messages across 

this faulty wiring

believe in me oh I do

I am a survivor

a miracle wrapped in nightmare

another cause lost in

gratitude

Doomed

 

Memory loosens her hold as

the sun subsides and

night enters the fray

I fell toward you, I know

even as the first breath of loss

corrupted my lungs

but truth is an endless singing in

the ears

I cannot quiet it

I must bend my knees before

the moon

as need suffers another

death

Another Conversation with Alturis

 

Alturis spun the hunting knife in slow circles, a thoughtful expression on his face. “You must have been sad to leave your friends when you moved here," he said.

“Not really.”

He arched an eyebrow, an invitation to explain. Megan didn’t particularly want to, but given that he was the psychopath with a hunting knife—and her only hope was to keep him talking—she forced herself to say, “I’m not good at having friends.”

“You’re a woman. All women have friends.”

Megan laughed a little. “Not in my case. I mean, I tried to. I wanted to have friends. But something always got in the way.”

“Such as?”

“Well…when I was little, and I lived with my mom, we moved around a lot. Even if we stayed in one place for a while, people figured out pretty quickly that she was a drug addict and we were poor, so no one wanted their kids to play with me. By the time I went to live with my aunt and uncle I was just tired of trying, I guess. And it was embarrassing to explain why I didn’t live with my mother.”

“But you are an adult now. No one cares about your mother anymore.”

“It still feels like too much work. I guess I’m just not comfortable with small talk,” Megan admitted. “I’m not that great at just sitting around chatting with people. I can do it for a little while, but then I get tired, and people realize I’m weird.”

Alturis made a dismissive noise. “In my experience there is nothing weird about the inability to make small talk.”

Megan didn’t ask him what those experiences were. The last thing she wanted to do was to remind him why they were sat in the Miller’s kitchen, with Mr. and Mrs. Miller dead in the living room.

“No friend in Minneapolis, though?” Alturis pressed. “Not a single one?”

Megan allowed herself to look away from that knife, as she said, “I had one friend for a little while. Someone I met at my yoga class."

"Had?"

Megan shrugged.

Alturis peered at her, the knife suddenly still. Her heartbeat exploding again, Megan rushed out, "She was funny, yet really nice at the same time. I almost felt comfortable around her. We’d go out to lunch after class and I’d come back not hating myself like I usually did after social experiences.”

“What went wrong?”

"I don't know. It--well, Alice said I spent too much time at home alone, so she started inviting me along when she and her friends went out to see a movie or a show. At first it was okay, even nice. But then I realized one of her friends—Jody—didn’t really like me. That would have been okay, except she and Alice were as thick as thieves.”

Megan stopped short at this ill-advised metaphor. If Alturis felt insulted by it—because, after all, he was a crook as well as a murder—he didn’t show it. After a moment Megan cleared her throat and continued, “I got the sense that Jody was making fun of me, and that Alice was laughing along with her.”

“How so?”

“They were always making jokes about people. And then I saw some back and forth between them on Facebook that seemed to reference things I’d said. I’m not always—smooth. I can say sort of dumb things.”

Snorting, Alturis replied, “This is true of us all, is it not?”

“I guess. And maybe I was reading too much into everything--maybe they weren’t talking about me at all. But I don't think so. I know I can be paranoid, but I have a pretty good radar for this stuff, after all those years of people judging my mom, and then me by extension.”

“That is very sad, if true—and if not, even more sad that you doubted Alice.”

“It's impossible to say,” Megan answered. She was generally willing to accept she might be wrong, and god knew, with this she had wanted to be wrong. She’d really liked Alice. The problem was, she couldn’t quite make herself believe it. “But that's over now,” she said. “In a way I was glad to move—to get away from the not knowing. It was a relief to just be done with it.”

His hunting knife in motion again, Alturis concluded, “And now here you are.”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Now here I am.”