Dying Inside

Nyquist came into the livingroom half an hour later, the blonde with him, both of them naked. He didn’t bother to knock, which surprised the redhead a little; Selig had no way of telling her that Nyquist had known they were finished. Nyquist put some music on and they all sat quietly, Selig and the redhead working on the bourbon, Nyquist and the blonde nipping into the Scotch, and toward dawn, as the snow began to slacken, Selig tentatively suggested a second round of lovemaking with a change of partners. “No,” the redhead said. “I’m all flicked out. I want to go to sleep. Some other time, okay?” She fumbled for her clothes. At the door, wobbling and staggering, making a boozy farewell, she let something slip. “I can’t help thinking there’s something peculiar about you two guys,” she said. In vino veritas. “You aren’t a couple of queers, by any chance, are you?”

SEVENTEEN.

I remain on dead center. Becalmed, static, anchored. No, that’s a lie, or if not a lie then at the very least a benign misstatement, a faulty cluster of metaphors. I am ebbing. Ebbing all the time. My tide is going out. I am revealed as a bare rocky shore, iron-hard, with trailing streamers of dirty brown seaweed dangling toward the absenting surf. Green crab scuttling about. Yes, I ebb, which is to say I diminish, I attenuate. Do you know, I feel quite calm about it now? Of course my moods fluctuate but

I feel

Quite calm

About it now.