“I’m sorry!” Michael shouts at his naked body in the mirror. He tenses as many muscles as he can and shakes violently, staring into his own eyes the entire time. “I’m fucking sorry!” He runs out of the bathroom and flings himself onto his bed where he writhes and grunts, punching blindly at the air and sheets. His thrashing grows sluggish as he gradually relaxes. He pants, tangled in a blanket, heart pumping in his ears. It’s late January. Winter quarter at the University of Oregon is in full swing and Michael should be occupied with the weighty coursework his syllabi announce. But he isn’t thinking about school at all. He’s far away, stuck in the events of the previous year, his mind now replaying the last conversation he and his ex-girlfriend Elise ever had. It’s last September and she’s tearing up. Michael notes her remarkable composure. It intimates that, for her, a long summer spent holding onto a wish he could at best caricature is coming to a close. She’d sought an ideal in Michael that he, a people-pleaser extraordinaire, had unconsciously feigned. A terrible mess ensued: Elise falling for a version of Michael that never existed, Michael straining himself to the breaking point to try and be Elise’s Michael, and, when that inevitably failed, attempting and failing to manage the emotional fallout. “I—” Elise says, closing her eyes. A tear rolls silently down her cheek, the afternoon light dancing off its dispersal across her upper lip. “I know we will find other people better suited for us,” she says, nodding. She turns her head toward Michael without making eye contact. “There was just a moment…you know?” She closes her eyes and gulps, her face a grief-stricken frown. Michael tries battening down feelings of relief as he watches Elise do her best to let go. A host of incongruous emotions jockey for position in his chest as he mulls over what to say. “I want you to know...how special you are,” he says quietly, embracing Elise from the side and rubbing her upper back. They sit like this for a few moments, Elise’s body softly heaving against his. “It’s probably time I go,” Michael says eventually, his growing impatience overpowering the accompanying guilt. He rises and exits Elise’s apartment out the back door, walking down the alleyway. Elise stands in the shade of her apartment building, watching him until he turns the corner onto the next street. Michael experiences what he’s dubbed “aftershocks” and does bizarre things in private, like what he’s just done, shouting at the ghost of Elise still living in his head and flailing violently at nothing in particular. He likes to think of these lapses as purges, where he “relives” the emotional excesses of his relationship, letting them exhaust themselves in the spent musculature of his sweating body. Michael wriggles free of his blanket and throws it to the side. He stares at the clock on the nightstand: 10:33am. His elective’s at 11. He hurriedly throws on an outfit and grabs his laptop bag on the way out the door. * * * The girl with long black hair has been staring at him on and off throughout most of the workshop. Michael’s tried avoiding her eyes, but he’s just finished reading, and the girl’s volunteering a first critique. “I didn’t really understand the part with the floating pyramid,” she says, looking up from her papers. “Is Lauren having some kind of hallucination?” Michael stares at her amber eye shadow and fidgets in his seat. “She’s just imagining it with her eyes closed,” he says, his gaze moving to the floor in the middle of the classroom. “She’s supposed to be thinking about the TV show she watches at the beginning of the story.” “Oh, well,” the girl says, glancing down at the pages in her hands, "I think that could maybe be made a little clearer," she says, speaking the word "clearer" haltingly, accentuating the syllables as she turns back to the story's first page. “Maybe if you had the show’s host’s words come through her mind again just before?” * * * Michael sits on a bench outside after class, a large organic chemistry textbook open and resting on his inner thighs. He’s reread the same explanation of resonance four times without registering the words. He stares at a diagram of hexane and benzene, his mind wandering. The dark lobby off NW 13th Avenue in Portland smells faintly of cleaning products. The rain outside beats down in sheets, the street a shallow stream. The lobby is about eight by eight feet and the lack of lighting gives the impression that all the businesses in the building are closed for the evening. Michael places a paper bag filled with fine-tipped colored pens on the floor. He removes his grey, rain- speckled peacoat and tosses it next to his bag. “I told you,” Michael says in a strained tone. “I told you that you should do what’s best for you.” Elise stabs his sternum with her right pointer finger. “You.” She stabs his sternum again, trembling and clenching her teeth. “Could have been a man.” “Hey.” A pair of black suede boots materialize over the top of Michael’s textbook. “I liked your story a lot.” Michael looks up. It’s the girl from his creative writing workshop. Her blue, white-flower-spotted dress flutters in the breeze. The noonday sun backs her head, causing Michael to squint. He sort of salutes, using his left hand as a visor. A relaxed smile spreads across her light-brown, oval face. Michael remembers the frenetic creation of his story. Writing quickly without brainstorming or outlining beforehand, he’d lapsed now and then into a kind of flow state. When he’d finished, he’d had the overall impression that the work was somewhat confused. “I honestly wasn’t sure about it,” he says. “I mean,” the girl begins, taking the opportunity to sit down next to Michael on the bench. “It definitely needs to be touched up in certain ways.” She pulls a set of papers from her laptop bag. Michael scoots a few inches away from her. He recalls that all his other classmates’ critiques were collected and given to him at the end of the workshop. “Like I think the part in the middle—Lauren’s internal monologue—that could actually work better as the story’s introduction.” A queasy rush moves upward through Michael’s chest, throat, and neck, clouding his mind. He nods and murmurs an acknowledgement, staring vacantly past the girl’s head at the trees in the quad. The girl clears her throat and Michael turns, slightly flustered. “Oh, yes. I think that could work.” He glances down. "Sorry, I've just been a bit lost in…” he says, gesturing at the textbook in his lap. “I’m Penelope,” the girl says, offering her right hand. Michael looks at her fingers for a moment, noticing for the first time the girl’s numerous rings. A blue stone clasped in silver prongs wraps around her middle finger. A gold, miniature chain-link rings her pinky. A thick silver ring with a face etched on it gleams from her left hand’s pointer finger. Tears fall from the etching’s eyes. He shakes her hand. “You’re studying chemistry?” she asks, looking at the symbols in the textbook on Michael’s lap. “Michael. And yes, I’ve just declared. You?” “I’m an English major.” Michael closes his textbook. “Sorry, but…” he begins, his eyes flitting from his left to his right knee. “I really should be going now.” He nods at his computer bag. “Class soon.” “Oh, well,” Penelope says, startled. “Here’s your marked-up copy.” She hands him the papers and he puts them in the back pocket of his bag. Penelope smiles. “See you in class Wednesday.” * * * When he’d told her she should do what was best for her, he’d meant to set her free, to release her from any sense of obligation or attachment to him. But freedom from him was not what Elise imagined to be best for herself. Her ideal was an entirely different order of reality, one requiring nothing short of a spiritual revolution in Michael. She imagined another world in which he had fallen as hopelessly in love as she. By the time he’d reiterated his desire for her to do what was best for her in that dim Portland lobby, Michael’d been struggling for months with a growing awareness of how incommensurate he and Elise’s feelings were. He’d battled his intuition to end things, selling himself a narrative of he and Elise’s intellectual and spiritual compatibility. Although partially true–Elise was remarkable in many ways that he admired–this fabrication could only forestall Michael’s real feelings for so long. He eventually admitted his disinterest to Elise, and broke things off. To Michael’s chagrin, his straightforwardness did nothing to assuage the throb of loss that enveloped Elise: She could not have what she wanted, and what she wanted had, in a sense, been stolen from her. Up until their final weeks of contact, Michael’d become a bullshitter in her eyes, a liar, an illusionist who’d played her from day one. And to an extent, she wasn’t wrong. He’d been something like these things, albeit accidentally. Michael knew this, and it tormented him. Elise’d eventually acknowledged his unintentionality, but by then he’d begun to distrust his own motives. As he rounded that alley’s corner last September and caught a final glimpse of her standing in the half-light of her building’s shadow, he’d begun to make a pact with himself. * * * Face down on his bed, fists clenched, neck muscles strained, Michael screams “Let me go!” as loud as he can into his pillow. He shifts his weight back, sitting up on his knees, and scoops the pillow into his arms. “I was just a kid, just a kid,” he repeats into the pillow while rocking back and forth. He gets up and begins pacing about his room, whispering “Don’t you see I’m doing everything I can to right this?” to himself repeatedly. After about a minute of this he goes into the bathroom and looks into the mirror, saying “Why do you not get this? Honestly? What the hell else is there to get?” He runs his sink faucet until it warms, splashing water on his face and then drying it. He sits down at the small desk by his window, looking at his papers. He’s completed most of his organic chemistry exercises so far, changing molecular structures from condensed to Kekule, bond-line to Kekule, hashed-wedged to condensed. He begins working on the exercise he left off on, mouthing “And now you’ve got me sounding like a fucking kook” as he draws a chain of carbon. When he finishes, he lies down and stares at the ceiling for a few moments before reaching over the side of his bed and pulling his laptop bag onto his chest. He removes Penelope’s copy of his story from its back pocket. The pages have short commentaries written in their margins, and when Michael turns to the back page, he finds it almost entirely filled up with ink. Penelope’s provided an analysis of Michael’s main character, Lauren. Michael feels the same queasiness he did when Penelope sat by him earlier in the day but tries quieting it by reading through the commentary. She’s given more thought to Lauren’s character than Michael’d expected from a classmate:
Below the final sentence is a drawing of a UFO beaming up a pyramid. Michael raises his head, pressing his chin against his upper chest. He’s wearing a black, long-sleeve t-shirt with five images of bats flying in various directions on its front. Michael yawns, putting the papers back into his computer bag and setting it on the ground beside his bed. He turns over onto his side. “Letting me go is the best thing you can do for yourself,” he says to himself quietly as he drifts to sleep. * * * A tempest quietly gathered in the center of Michael’s brain, rushing up and outward, ricocheting gently about his skull. He didn’t want to, but he did. Left forearm draped across the steering wheel, Elise stared in silence. Another will flowed through his larynx, “I love you” ringing tinnily in his ears. Cold lips. The warm wetness of a tongue. “I’m so glad you said something – I would’ve never mustered the courage.” A smile spread across his face at the word “courage.” The first few months passed like a skimmed book. He lived a montage: A blonde mane happy eyes glittered through. Crumpled bedsheets. Mornings in cafes popping poached eggs over potatoes. Lengthy kisses. Aimless drives along the county’s borders. A triangular yard hemmed with rhododendrons. Craft beer and cereal. Such is the intoxication of reckless abandon, of headlong sprints into the unknown. It was as though his life had begun with that first kiss in her car. Everything pre-Elise dropped away. He charmed himself into an otherworld. Michael only partially remembers the night things first came to a head. Elise had voiced a string of insecurities, insecurities which prodded at the underlying instability of Michael’s convictions. He'd sat there, battling the urge to thrash about in an uncontrollable frenzy, steadying himself by focusing on a pulled thread in the room's carpet. Inwardly he continued to spiral. Eventually his mind went blank. He lost himself in an immaterial burning that engulfed his chest. Everything deflated. The external world became a rumor. He savagely beat himself across the temple with his shoe. An inky fog clouded the room. Unplaceable hissing filled his ears. As his vision returned, his shoe—bit-by-bit—reappeared, lying on the floor before him, laces splayed. He heard whimpering and raised his head. Elise lay on the bed, hands covering her eyes. “Please—whatever happens—please promise you’ll never do that again.” * * * “He’s weird, isn’t he?” Penelope says as she exits the classroom behind Michael. “Who?” Penelope walks up alongside Michael, and they continue down the hallway together. “Gorman,” she says. Professor Gorman’s saggy jowls and wispy, shoulder-length white hair crackle across Michael’s mind. “Didn’t you notice when he randomly said ‘he ‘looks good for his age’?” Michael had drifted into a content-less daydream during class as Professor Gorman talked at length about making the things your characters want hard to achieve. “Even if they’re doing little things like shopping—you’ve got to invent hurdles for them to go over,” he’d said, scanning the room intently. “Otherwise, your story’s gonna be boring.” Michael opens the door leading out of the hallway, holding it open for Penelope. “He got this funky grin on his face,” Penelope continues, following behind Michael. “And brushed his hair back, and then just said ‘I look good for my age’ for no particular reason.” “Huh. That is pretty random,” Michael says detachedly as he turns toward the quad. Penelope catches up, walking beside him. “It’s a bit creepy is what it is,” she says. They make their way through the quad and sit on the same bench where Michael was when Penelope first introduced herself the week prior. Michael laughs as he sets his computer bag between the two of them. “Maybe he’s trying to reinvent himself as a gigolo,” he offers. “Ugh, that’s disturbing as all shit.” “Or maybe he’s been working out?” Michael suggests. “It was just,” Penelope pauses, searching for the rest of her sentence. “Extremely irrelevant.” Michael shrugs, holds his arms—palms up—in front of him, and, cocking his head, nods in agreement. “Maybe...” Penelope begins. “Maybe Gorman used to be a bodybuilder or something. I mean, those jowls, and the way his arm skin sags. He’s like a punctured balloon.” Michael laughs. * * * “Goooooo yooour way. I’ll take the long way ‘round. Oh, I’ll find my own way down.” The song lilts hauntingly through the cold room, the subdued guitars and drums rolling off the walls.
“And hoooold yooour gaze. There’s coke in the Midas touch. A joke in the way that we rust.”
Michael puts down his pen and stares at the paper, humming along with the song. Unending rows of redwoods blend into tan-orange streaks flanking the road. His foot leans into the gas pedal. The coupe hurdles toward the blue pillar of light that fills the space between the trees, faraway where the sky meets the asphalt, and the highway drops from sight. Elise’s hand feels warm in his. The radio’s volume’s maxed and they’re both yell-singing: “And you’ll find loss! And you’ll fear what you found! When the weather comes—” they glance at each other and emphasize—“OH! Tearing down!” Michael scoots his chair back, his bare feet sliding across the ice-cold tile. He shivers as he stands. She’d been so obsessed with Ben Howard that his music was synonymous with her in Michael’s mind. “Oats in the Water” was, for Michael, the sound of Elise. The song’s reached its crescendo, the reverb-drenched guitar blasting over repeated crash cymbal hits. Michael lets his arms hang limp at his sides and twists back and forth, bobbing his head all the while. He dances like a rag doll along to the song’s thumping conclusion. * * * He stares at her hair, noting the way it swims in the wind, how sunlight illuminates its concavities. She’s just told him the blue stone she wears is lapis lazuli, which “is good for just about everything, if you don’t know.” She bends her head forward, staring into the ring, her hair encircling her like a bed curtain. “It’s like your own little psychologist. It’ll reveal to you habits of thought and emotion that sabotage healing. It’ll cure insomnia.” “You’re not one of those people who puts stones out under a full moon to ‘charge’ them, are you?” Michael asks, eyeing the lapis lazuli on Penelope’s hand in mock suspicion. She stares at him, smiling. “I’ve done it before.” Penelope’s come to the University of Oregon by way of Tucson. Her hair’s her mother’s, a native of the Navajo reservation in White Cone, Arizona. “I’m a bruja,” she says. “A witch.” Michael nods. She reads the incredulousness on his face. “It’s part of my heritage,” she laughs. “Don’t worry—I don’t turn into a wolf at night.” Michael cocks his head slightly. “A wolf?” “An old Navajo story,” she explains, waving it away with her hand. “For another time.” It’s chilly under a cloudless sky. The farmer’s market in the quad bustles with students. Michael and Penelope sit on the grass watching their peers weave this way and that among the booths eating and laughing. “I knew someone who used to claim that our behaviors were reducible to the brain’s neurochemistry,” Michael says. “Sometimes they’d say there’s no difference between drug-induced pleasure and the pleasure associated with achieving a goal.” Penelope stares at him silently. “It always felt dreadfully restrictive to me,” Michael continues, staring at the ground. Penelope squints. “Restrictive?” “To go around—all day—thinking that everything you and everyone else does is essentially some emanation of chemical influence on neural networks.” “You mean it’s, like, dehumanizing?” “Well,” Michael says, taking in a deep breath. “The human being kind of disappears in that view, right? Everyone’s just some kind of biological robot or something.” They sit silently for a few moments. “What the heck made you think of that?” Penelope asks. “You saying you’re a witch. It made me think of the other end of the spectrum.” Michael pauses, looking at her. “Of belief.” After a minute of silence, Penelope pokes Michael’s shoulder. “Have you ever been to a seance?” Michael shrugs. “No?” He looks at her bemusedly. “I mean, I played with an Ouija board a couple times when I was a kid.” Penelope laughs. “I’m talking about a real seance.” “I don’t have any idea what that is, honestly.” “Do you want to?” Michael fidgets, staring off into the busyness of the farmer’s market. He scrunches his mouth to left, then the right. “No pressure or anything,” Penelope adds, her eyes scanning his face. Michael sighs. “Why not?” * * * He’d spent half a lifetime reinventing himself. There’d been freedom in the incertitude, a sort of eternal escape. He’d lived as no one in particular, a drifting shapelessness, solidifying in fits and starts only for necessity’s sake. This mercuriality proved the perfect foundation for wishes to run wild. It drew others in, fascinating and bewildering them. He’d been a playground for others’ dreams. After Elise, he’d concluded that it had all been a great refusal and renouncement: elastic and characterless, his life until then had been little more than a prolonged turning away from living. It was a miserable realization, and he shuddered at the years spent dancing around defining himself, lingering in the liminal. Maybe, at bottom, Elise’d simply been a refuge, a space where he could hold up for a while and continue forgetting himself. The thought’d chilled him, and he’d decided that, at present, he was unfit for anything other than acquaintanceship. * * * The aromatic scent of burnt cedar hangs in the kitchen’s air. Michael watches his murky, diffuse reflection in the window opposite him. The darkness outside runs into his features, his face turning into a depthless jumble of eyes and cheeks, all mixed up with reflected light, lingering smoke, and black night. A curved, waist-high table runs along half of the wall to his left. Multiple china storage sets are stacked on it, looking not unlike pink and grey wedding cakes. Michael sits at a four-person wooden table. Innumerable candles loom on surrounding shelves, stools, and the kitchen’s island, reminding Michael of the tiered votives he’d seen when he was a child, travelling with his parents in Vienna and Rome. Every few moments their flames sway as Penelope’s arm swoops by. A chain with a silver key attached to one end lies on the table. Beside it a piece of printer paper with what looks like x- and y-axes drawn on it in pen. Around the edges of the paper are some half-moon- shaped arrows, indicating a circular movement around the axes. Penelope spins slowly for another minute, her arm bobbing the mildly smoking cedar. Michael stares intently between his knees at the turquoise rug the table sits on. The designs on the corners remind him of old portrait frames. Penelope pauses and dips the stick in a small bucket of water on the floor. It gives off a low hiss. She moves to the island and places the wet, blackened wood on a spoon rest, picking up the small vase of olive oil that sits beside it. She turns, facing Michael, and makes the sign of the cross three times. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” she says, standing completely still with her eyes closed. She holds the vase of oil with both hands in front of her chest. Her hair lies along the lengths of her arms, falling just a few inches beneath her elbows. “He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul; He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.” Michael stares at her quizzically. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; my cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” She places the vase on the table beside the piece of paper. “Voilà,” she says, smiling. “Holy oil.” “Where’d you get that from?” Michael asks, smirking. “I read about in a few different places, and I’ve used it before.” She opens her eyes wide. “It works.” “Are you Catholic?” Penelope laughs. “No, it’s just a way of creating a protective seal on the oil.” She looks at the clock on the wall. It reads at 2:56am. “Okay, it’s almost time. We only have a few minutes.” She dips her pointer finger in the oil and puts in her mouth. “Go on,” she says, inching the vase toward Michael. He sucks a bit of oil off his finger and watches Penelope curiously. She hurries to the window across from him and makes the sign of the cross in front of it, then speed walks into another room, making the same sign she as enters, disappears for a few moments, and then reappears down the hallway on Michael’s right, where she signs again at the front door. She reenters the kitchen and sits at the table across from Michael. He yawns and rubs his eyes. “OK, that’s it. We’re ready.” Penelope points to the chain and key. “Remember what I showed you?” Michael picks the chain up by its end, swings the key in a circular motion, and begins to nod his head in acknowledgement. “The movement of the pendulum indicates ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ and ‘I don’t know,’” Penelope says, leaning against the wall of the women’s’ restroom. Michael starts swinging the chain in his hand. The silver key bounces around in the air. Penelope walks over and gently tries to steady Michael’s shoulder. She feels him tense and lets go. “Sorry,” she says, putting her hands up and taking a step back. “It’s okay,” he says quietly. “It’s just,” he pauses, glancing back at the door. “Are you sure no one ever comes in here?” He laughs awkwardly. “This might look rather bizarre.” “Yeah, I’m sure,” Penelope says, waving her hand in front of her face. “I’ve literally never seen anyone in here. I don’t think they’re holding many classes in this part of the building right now.” She stares at Michael for a moment and smiles. “Just keep your elbow bent and flat and stick it out away from you.” Michael follows her instructions and begins swinging the chain and key once more. “Just deliberately move it along one of the axes. So, move it up and down. Do it deliberately, you’re teaching your body how to do it. Teaching your unconscious.” Michael focuses on the coordinated motion of his arm and sees the pendulum moving towards and away from his sternum. “That’s gonna be your ‘yes’ or ‘no’,” Penelope says as she begins to pace. “Now you want to just begin to move it into a circle – this is called a ‘transitional circular swing’ – and move it consciously but gently into the other axis, side to side. Keep going, try it again. Remember, your body needs to become comfortable with this.” “That candle,” Michael says, staring over Penelope’s left ear. “It’s dripping on the floor.” “Shit. It’s burning at a weird angle.” Penelope blows the wick out and tilts the candle so the wax pools away from its sunken, leaking wall. She gets up and puts it in the sink. “So, start swinging the pendulum in a circular motion,” she says, wiping her hands on a paper towel and sitting down again. “And take a moment to find your ‘yes.’” Michael begins lightly turning the pendulum above the paper on the table. Penelope leans forward. “Say ‘yes’ to yourself as powerfully as you can.” Michael closes his eyes and says “yes” as if he’s speaking into his own chest. “Take that feeling, wherever you feel it in your body, and move it up into your shoulder, your elbow, your hand, and finally down into the pendulum.” The key slowly moves into a front-to-back motion. “Good. Now, go back into the circular motion. Say ‘no,’ find it in your body, feel it. Move it up into your shoulder, your elbow, hand, and into the pendulum.” With his eyes still closed, Michael says “no.” In his mind, he sees himself shouting the word into a bottomless ravine. It echoes and fades. Rotation by rotation, the key gradually begins to move side to side. “Good,” Penelope says. “We can start by asking something mundane.” “Will it rain this week?” Michael asks. “No?” Penelope says in surprise, watching the pendulum begin to move side to side. “Thank god. You can ask a question secretly, Michael. If you want.” He watches the pendulum circle above the table for a few moments. Shades of orange candlelight reflect off the key, vanishing and reappearing with its twirls. A faint, intermittent tinkling comes from the chain’s last loop as it rubs against the key’s head. The weight of sleep suddenly grows palpable and Michael bites his lower lip. The dull sting jolts the drowsiness away. He hears his name being called faintly as an unsolicited image of Elise passes into his mind’s eye. Again, he stands at the edge of a bottomless ravine. The key continues to spin. A vague figure forms in the darkness before him. He hears his name again, slightly clearer. His eyelids sag. Elise’s face appears in the ravine’s chasm, her features highly defined. Half-sleep whisks him away. Her eyes and mouth move in slow motion, as if silently pleading. “Her voice, it changed all of a sudden,” Michael says, his eyes closed. Penelope sits at attention and watches him intently. “She sounded like a small child, like she was trying to will everything into being okay by wishing intensely enough that it were. It was as if the part of her the external world never touched was speaking. And it was like she expected me to magically fix everything for her, like I was predestined to utterly transform her world.” Michael blinks rapidly a few times and lifts his head. He feels his cheeks flush as he registers the shock on Penelope’s face. “What,” Penelope begins, speaking slowly. “The.” She inhales. “Hell?” * * * “She was with a guy for, like, two years who was lying to her. She really loved him. It kinda fucked her up, you know? She’s just fearful, that’s all.” “Yeah, she told me about that,” Michael says, wishing he could disappear into the larger crowd indoors. He takes a drink of his whiskey sour and grimaces. It was made by a guy who was already pretty drunk, and it tastes completely off, almost like pineapple. He’s been cornered in the house’s backyard by Paul, one of Elise’s oldest friends. It’s Elise’s friend Jenny’s birthday party. A few groups of people stand around them, smoking and talking. Paul smiles and puts his beer down on the table beside them. “Well, you know, I don’t mean to intrude too much, but she’s shared some stuff with me. I just, you know,” he says, looking down at his hands. “I just wanna make sure you’re okay and that you’re really sure about her, if you know what I mean.” Michael looks around, silently panicking. He shrugs and says “I—I—yeah.” Paul tries to look as reassuring as possible. “Look, man. I’m just trying to talk to you.” “I know, I know.” Michael feels the tensions of the past month and a half swirling just beneath his sternum. “And I appreciate it.” His temple stings mildly, as if a ghost has swung a shoe across his face. All the back-and-forth dialogue with himself about Elise mounts and throbs through his brain, creating cacophonous mental crosstalk. He looks at Paul. “It’s just—” “Hey, you two!” Elise says, excitedly wedging herself between them, causing Michael to stumble slightly. “Jenny’s about to do her cake inside. Come on.” She kisses Michael’s cheek and pulls him toward the house by the hand. Paul picks up his beer and follows. Note: This piece originally appeared in Problématique Volume Two, in February 2021. C.H. Gorrie is a poet, writer, editor, and musician hailing from San Diego, California. He holds an MA in English Literature from San Diego State University. The current nonfiction editor of Consequence, he also co-founded Synesthesia Literary Journal and acted as its managing editor for four years. He is the de facto A&R Representative of Reality House West, a Southern California music collective and event production company. His creative work has appeared in literary venues such as The Penn Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, aaduna, Problematique, ANON Magazine, Aztec Literary Review, Poems-for-All, and Duende.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
|