Sweet Aveline

There’s a crack in the road where the ring went down, not a crack a pothole, not a pothole a sinkhole, a place where the bedrock died and the clay slipped down and the underworks fell in and almost swallowed the whole damn town.

Okay, not really, but it was on the evening news.

So was the symphony. So was the fight. So was the meteor that put on the lightshow last night, and the red suit jacket and the puff of big blonde hair.

They expect to have it repaired today. 

“What about the ring?”

He shrugs and cracks another beer. “It’s gone, man. It’s just a little thing.”

“So,” she said. “Go on,” she said. But he didn’t say another word.

Instead, she filled the silence with guesses at what might have been: damp laundry, a jagged hole, and twisted bloody sheets. 

“Okay,” she said. “I see what you mean. Yes, I see now exactly what you mean.”

Her glasses fall into the gutter but her knees can’t bend to meet them there. So her back arcs over and her palms float down until they press flush against the concrete. Every twist, she thinks, the rivets in her spine come loose and spring all over the road.

The streetcars used to carry them down this wicked road —

Eggs and toast at the breakfast counter, fifty cents however which way you like it —

My little red shoes glinting in the sun —

She fishes her glasses from the sediment of the morning’s little rain, and gathers her trench coat around her throat to start the walk again.

Oh, what a simple pinch of flesh can do: she left fingerprints on a patch of skin or two, but it was nothing he couldn’t wash away.

The next day she stained her hands with berry juice, twisted from the branch and oozing sugar blue. Tart fingers, she vowed, would leave a mark next time, ten blurry bells of sweetness for tongues to take away.

But there never was a next time.

And she never got her taste.

Still, she doesn’t touch the doorknobs anymore. Just in case, she nods, can never be too safe.

The lights sputter out in sequence, pressed out of service by tattered power lines. Outside her window the back lane dims into darkness, damp footfalls and the whiff of something rotted and gnawed down to its core.

The bathtub tap is dripping.

In the black of this powerless night, in the wet and raging potent of this black and aimless night, she scratches out a word into the dust along the railing. A word, then a name, and then a final rattled sigh.

Oh, but the bathtub tap keeps dripping, its droplets slipping by —

But you are the

Were the

You are

.

The truck pulls near to the tattered power lines and the bucket rises up. She wipes the dust with her fingers, and turns her ears towards the sound of laughing.