Page 53 - Vol. VI #1

Important things.
crown of his head, fingers spread deep into the forest of his hair.
Like that he can’t take a shower without using a Q-tip to clean his ears. Or that one of the pur- est joys of his life is eating peanut butter by the spoonful, straight from the jar.
Time. Circles. Never to return, and yet always returning.
Or that he enjoys trying new restaurants when- ever one opens. And they—this guy and his new girlfriend—just so happen to live in a nice big city with lots of new places to eat, so periodi- cally they make plans to go to one or another of these places.
Maybe he carries some unspoken fondness for the place. Maybe he’s just waiting for her to figure it out—she’s not certain, but she knows. As much as she doesn’t know why, she knows that the place— the place is a touchstone of some kind. A totem. A circle, returned to itself.
Except there’s this one place.
So one night, she surprises him.
This one place that they didn’t try when it opened, not because he’d said he didn’t want to, or that
he was simply uninterested in the cuisine, but because—conspicuously, you might say—he’d
Maybe it’s a special night—a birthday. A promo- tion—no more menial jobs for our guy. A night for celebration. Mutual appreciation. She tells him they’re going to dinner, but not where, and clue- less, secure within the structure of his new nest, he dresses happily, kisses her deeply over a glass of wine in the kitchen. But as they get closer, as they turn down certain streets, angling toward a certain direction, it starts to build in his stomach, this turning, this circling, and he realizes, under- standing without knowing how it is that he could understand, even as he leaves the question un- asked, just where it is they’re going. But he does– leave the question unasked, that is—because...
“...anything real starts to hurt a er a while. That’s how you know it’s real.”
Because he doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know what he would or should say.
never spoken of it, never offered it up as a not- so-subtle option he’d like very much to experi- ence. Which was strange.
Or so he tells himself. But really, maybe...
Strange, because of the menu he keeps crammed in the back of a drawer. A secret search some- times hidden in his browser history the morning after a late night.
Maybe because he’s hoping against hope. Though for what, he’s not certain.
Not often.
Not always.
Just every now and then. But still, it’s there.
And then—a table. A seat. A setting–mis en place, he hears echoing along his hollows, though a ring- ing fills his ears at the awkward intonation of the words, spoken not in his voice, but hers. A scene, yet to play out.
There in the way his eyes widen, his pupils dilat- ed. The geometry of a hand, lingering at the
And he tries, oh how he tries.
(continued on next page)
And then—the place.
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