The Coming Storm

I avoided Bryan all Saturday.  He bore silent witness to this until Sunday morning, when he joined me in the kitchen.  “I just got off the phone with Bob,” he said.  “I have some bad news.  He and Shelly broke up.”

The apple I’d been holding landed with a thud on the cutting board.  “You’re kidding me!”

“I’m afraid not.”

“But why?”

“You know how Shelly has been in Chicago for the past couple of months?”

“Yeah.  For work, right?”

“Not quite.  She’s been seeing someone else there.”

“You mean another guy?” I gasped.  At Bryan's nod I said, “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 just moved in together.”

“Oh, no…”  I sank against the counter.  First Cathy, and now Shelly.  The nightmare never ended.  “Is he okay?”   

“Not at all, so I invited him over for dinner—I didn’t think you would mind.  He could use some cheering up.”

“That’s fine with me,” I answered, but it was going to take a lot more than dinner 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 worldview had changed.  Maybe he had thought to himself, this time things will be different.  I couldn’t say.  All I did know was that seeing Bob slumped in the dining room chair, appearing aged and defeated, made me hate Shelly more than I’d ever hated anyone in my life.  “There will be someone else,” I told him.  “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 as his puppy dog brown eyes brimmed with tears I could have sworn I heard his heart breaking.  “I appreciate what you’re trying to say, Rachel,” Bob 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.”

1953

Yes, the water is cold

January sea freeze makes even the sand shudder

no warm-weather month in sight

                my molecules for so long racing

                colliding

                begging

                for the slowing

the midnight water is cold for me

this is the time

Some fisherman embracing this

icy body

he will find me

by my blue silence he will know

                lost interest in breathing

                this air so full of riddles and

rhymes

Fear of damnation gave way to fear of life

                always the smoke from my fingertips

                as the flames gutted me inside

cleansed my faith in waiting

hope extinguished with

the coming tide

Because the water is cold here

and hesitation’s wounds were bone dry

                turn my head to the black sky fading

                to the moon deserting what must die

even God in his kingdom

must forgive those who

gasp for breath as

they cry

because the water is cold enough

this once

and I must

                swallow it

                swallow it

fill the thirsting void

tonight

No more debating

when there is nothing for saying

                                I will be all right

Then

to remember is to fall

memory the betrayal of

what decorates the 

hall

a collection of explosions

kept

in an open jar

Surrounded

“Sabotage,” Lewis said in a dark voice.  “And I think we all know who’s responsible.”

“You’ll never be able to prove it,” Dirk answered, his eyes closed.  “But it would be nice if you could.”

Everyone sighed.

“We totally need CCTV in this place,” Lewis grumbled, “now that it’s getting so cut throat.”

“It wasn’t like that before Diana showed up,” Mike put in.  

Lewis scowled at him.  “Any guy who can’t handle a girl beating him is a pussy,” he returned.  “Anyway, she’s a freaking MIT graduate!  Of course she’s going to be better than us.  And at least we have someone who can show us new stuff, unlike Scott, whose great ideas always make our bots blow up.”

Now everyone nodded.

“Well,” Lewis said, after a moment’s silence, “maybe we can’t prove it, but someone should go apologize to her.  She might not come back otherwise, and that would suck.  We need her help for our battle with the Droid Boys.”  He turned to Matt.  “You do it.  She likes you best.”

“She does?” Matt asked, taken aback.  

“Of course she does,” Lewis answered.  “She never calls you a moron, does she?”

Now that Matt thought about it, he realized that Diane hadn’t ever called him a moron.  Still, he protested, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Tell her that we know Scott probably did it but we can’t prove it and he’s a moron.  Then beg her not to quit and say we might install CCTV.”

“We can’t afford to install CCTV,” Mike objected.  

“I know, dufus,” Lewis replied, “but she doesn’t know that, does she?”

“Oh, come on,” Dirk said.  “She’ll know we’re lying.”

“Maybe.  But it’s the thought that counts.”  Lewis slapped Mike on the back.  “Go on, Obi-Wan.  You’re our only hope!”

Wake Up

This place I find you

the clouds mirrored in your 

eyes 

daylight                                 

a shade too misleading

Nightmare

silence a mocking foe

shrouded               in hope

I was waiting where did you go        

you cannot say and I         I just do not know

from way over there

you do not echo anywhere

I am so

lost

the deadliest place is no place new at all

this makes me sad               nothing I haven’t been before

this makes me wonder               nothing I haven’t feared before

this makes me afraid to sleep with the door 

closed

The Watershed

I met her at the cafe where I liked to read the paper in the morning.  At the time she struck me as nothing special: just another smiley college student waiting tables over the summer.  Only after she gave me the wrong coffee three days in a row did I really pay any notice to her.

During her rambling apology—“I’m so sorry, I just can’t remember if the white doily means vanilla or regular, I keep thinking white has to be vanilla and then I think, no, it’s the opposite, and then I get myself all mixed up”—I didn’t know whether to laugh or tell her to go away.  In the end I did neither.   Eventually I would come to wish I had done the latter.