Film: A Short Love Story
A couple embrace in the corner until one of them peels
off like a price sticker and is out the door and all that’s left
for me to look at are the good women around this table, talking,
drinking Anchor Steam. I’m only half-in the conversation when someone
from the other end of the table drops your name, casual, all about
something else, as if she didn’t know the story, and suddenly I
want to touch your mouth. Outside this barroom, the whine and struggle
of passing traffic, rain, wet crows in the pear tree, a long lawn
dotted with Adirondack chairs.
What memories do any couple owe to outsiders? The
history of how they met, pitched back against the wall, chewed on
words, drove Short Pierre Street then Old Military Road, heading
to Wisdom. How it came about on one of that year’s three perfect
days—fall in the edge of their eyes, its capped toe pushing into
the porch floorboard—that they began with road sex, two near strangers,
three-quarters through the century? Or only how we ended: fixed
in the glossy eight-by-tens of our lives?
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