He went to see her once a week but refused all dinner invitations. He couldn’t bear the density or lateness of her love.
There’s an elegant, tall woman who walks a Great Dane the color of dryer lint; I am afraid that the woman is unwell because she walks rigidly, her face pulsing as if intermittently electrified by pain. I sometimes imagine how, should I barrel around a corner to find her slumped on the ground, I would drape her over her dog, smack his withers, and watch as he, with his great dignity, carried her home.
The lake goosebumped; I might have been looking at the sensitive flesh of an enormous lizard.
Helena was in that viscous pool of years in her late thirties when she could feel her beauty slowly departing from her.
He married her because to not do so had ceased to be an option during the night.
Language wilted between them.
waited for him to speak, but he had always been a man who knew how to groom the silence between people.
Though his English was limited to the rap lyrics he mouthed to the music, she managed to convey what she wanted to do to him.
She was homely, three years older than he, a thick-legged antiques dealer who described her shop down a street so tiny the sun never touched her windows. He thought of her in the silent murky shop, swimming from credenza to credenza.
A week after he left me, his heart broke itself apart. He was in bed with his mistress. She was so preposterously young that I assumed they conversed in baby talk.
She’d never met a child with beady eyes before. Beadiness arrives after long slow ekes of disappointment, usually in middle age.
