I Shall Not Walk Alone (9)

Beauty that we left behind how shall we tomorrow find -Ben Harper

-9-

I Shall Not Walk Alone

 

Beauty that we left behind
how shall we tomorrow find
Set aside our weight in sin
so that we can live again.

-Ben Harper

 

The cyan waves swelled and dipped like charcoal notes on sheet music, the oceanic symphony mounting on its stairwell crescendo, a Babel ascent.  As they bottomed-out, they splintered into sudden trills before winding into a swallowed diminuendo against the spruce paneling of a row boat, the resonance on wood caught in forzando like a spinal tapping in an operating room. 

-Sure it’ll be alright?

Cale leaned over the bow, a canteen in hand.

-Water’s fresh.

A figure stated as he palmed the oars and continued rowing.

-Really?

Cale filled his canteen and took a deep swig before hacking it up.

-It’s salty!

-Course it’s salty.  It’s an ocean.

The other figure announced, his feet dangling over the stern.  Cale damned them both and pitched the canteen into the waves.

-You might need that later.

-For what?

-How else are you going to drain the ocean?

Cale, no longer amused by their antics, crossed him arms and scoffed. 

-Drain the ocean…

They ignored him; the one still rowing, the other eying the sun as it soaked the ocean in autumn fluoride. 

They were familiar to Cale, not in appearance, but in concept, like the ghost of a feeling in memory.  Who did they remind him of? Why were they familiar?  It was as if he knew them like a writer knows his protagonist ,or a painter, his canvas subject.  He wondered if, perhaps, they were personifications of his songs, breathing lyrics, but when he moved to inquire, he felt bound to a scripted moment where only silence was meant to ensue.

-There.

The reclining brother whispered, pointing beyond Cale.  He turned and found a naked shoreline dominated by cliffs that seemed to pin the horizon against itself.

-What’s there?  

-It doesn’t matter.  We’re leaving you now.

The other brother stopped rowing and folded his hands in his lap.  Cale eyed the shoreline, still yards away.

-Leaving me?

-Leaving you.

-Look how far-

-Leaving you.

They repeated without stirring, still as paper cut-outs in flat dimension.  Cale damned them, swung a leg over the side of the boat, and eased himself in.  He expected deep water, but it only went up to his knees.

-What now?

-We leave you.

The reclining brother noted and waved him off as the other brother started rowing away. 

-Wait!

Cale stepped back toward them, lost his footing, and collapsed into the shallow water as the pair faded gradually like tattoos in blistering sunlight.

Soaked and confused, Cale shrugged off the occurrence and started up the beach until the patchwork of damp moving shadows around his feet caught his attention.  Driven into staple gun consternation, he wheeled around, but it was only the ocean greasing the shore in thick brushstrokes.    Initially, he dismissed it, yet every time he stopped, the water ceased and gurgled around his heels. 

-Odd…

He told himself and picked up the pace, but no matter how fast or how slow, whether he zig-zagged or back-tracked, the surf clung to his footsteps.

Ignoring it, he kept on until he noticed the sky twisting into a spark plug orange, then a native indigo tint, before finally swelling into raisin purple.  A distant rumble, like a freight train kneed off the tracks, sounded off behind him and stole his movement.  Pivoting, he found the horizon beyond billowing into casket black, the waves surmounting into a cloaked mass, growing and crawling toward the shore.

He turned away and worked himself into a steady jog, but the cliff line seemed to slip further and further away while the ocean kept rising around his ankles.  Suddenly, whip crack thunder choked out the brush-snare buzz of the waves as a steady rainfall began to hack at the sand like liquid mallets denting sheet metal into fretted imperfection. 

Looking back again over his shoulder, he caught sight of the looming waves only yards away and  barges and tankers arching and careening with the goliath water as it pile-drove the surface below.

Cale broke into a sprint and the cliffs finally stopped receding.  He could see a tunnel carved into the base and an iron gate bolted against the mouth.  A woman in a soiled wedding dress lingered behind it for a moment, like a question of love straddling the tip of a tongue that spoke to soon, before wheeling around and heading down the tunnel.

-Wait!

Cale shouted, but his words were only smothered by the pillow of sound bellowing around him- the crash symbol thunder, the gutting of steel as behemoth vessels were torn against the beach head, and the artillery bravado of wave after wave drumming the shore.

-Wait! Let me in! 

Cale collapsed against the gate and rattled it desperately, but the woman only continued to fade away, her auburn hair turning November grey, her mango hands into wrinkled oak, her footsteps, a Vivaldi glide, like a bow across pale strings.

 -The storm!

He called after her, pitching a finger behind him before wheeling around to face the tempest, but it was gone. 

All of it. 

The waves, the roaring wind, the lightning, the shattered ships.  It was all gone, as if it had never even happened, as if he’d only twisted the fabric of a soft dream into an unnecessary nightmare.

Caught in consternation, he turned back to the cave, to the lady in white, but he only heard her whisper somewhere in the cellar of his mind in a voice he knew and missed, the syllables echoing like a coin dropped down a dead well, a dream pang.

-You are the storm.

The words spoken in Aurora’s voice echoed long after Cale woke in cold sweats.  It all seemed to oscillate between the images of her fading and aging to the two figures rowing away, the culminating storm, and the sudden calm, but her whisper stuck with him like frost on a window pane. 

You are the storm.  The storm. 

Dreams had always intrigued him and he had just as many deep memories of past dreams as he did of past moments in reality, but none had ever caught him so exposed before, so weak, so shattered.  It struck him like a typical nightmare, but the thorns drew out more than fear, they cut at who and what he was.  Cale understood that often dreams dead man float the issues we refuse to face in the waking life and the unresolved we try to brush under the carpet to placate our highway consciousness.   What is that then?

In an attempt to root his nerves and distill harmony in the white noise, Cale grabbed his guitar and headed to the rooftop of the apartment complex.   Like Aden, he found solace in creative expression, and in music, shelter from the haboob.  He could bury the rush of everything in a single chord- vent pain in a minor, wired joy in a major, and sprung tension in a seventh.  Still, even with music, the nightmare throttled his thoughts. 

The last dream that caught Cale so offhand was years ago when he was in high school.  He could remember clearly every strand, every detail, every step, thought, and emotion as he fell through it.  First, walking down the strip in the middle of a desert with the stars burning like heroine needle points, the initial comfort in space without definition, in being without meaning, and in isolation without the necessity of needing company.  Then, as the dream unfolded, the silence became gassed by the tin twang of hundreds of wind chimes hanging on a Pablo mission in the distance.  

It was curiosity that drew him to the marmalade doors, he remembered, and not a forced movement like in most dreams.  But when he stepped into the abandoned desert chapel, it was an inability to turn away that led him between the racks of lifeless bodies, all wearing the masks of everyone he ever knew or- would know. 

What frightened him now, thinking back on the nightmare, was remembering Aurora’s face briefly, a face at the time he didn’t know because he hadn’t met her yet.  Until now, that is, because it had aged exactly like it did in the dream tonight.

“Can’t sleep?”

He heard Aden ask from behind.

“Mind if I sit up here with you?”

Cale was still angry at him, but he knew Aden was all he had and he was the only one who could possibly even begin to understand.

“No, no I don’t mind.”

Aden pulled himself up on the cinder railing and hung his feet over the ledge.

“I’m sorry I left you like I did.”

“Nothing to be sorry about.” 

At first Cale said it to tranquilize the tension, but now that Aden was here and not at Shoshanna’s, Cale realized he never really did leave, not last night, not today, and not tonight. Perhaps, he thought, I let it all get to me and I crucified the one person who, no matter what, will always be here.

“I am though; I should have stopped you last night.”

Maybe, Cale did remind himself, but what’s done is done.  He wouldn’t hold a grudge, especially now that he needed his input on the dream.

“It’s done.  It’s over.”  Cale sighed. “What made you come back so early?  I thought you were with Shoshanna.”

“I was.”

“How was it?”

“It was great, it really was.” Cale caught Aden in loop and knew something was wrong.  For Aden, it was great if he said it only once, but if he said it twice it was only great because he was trying to convince himself that’s how he should be feeling about the situation. “It’s just-”

Aden hesitated, shrugged it off, and turned away.

“It’s just-” Cale repeated.

“It’s just… I don’t know.”

“Why’d you come up here?”

“Why’d you come up here?” Aden repeated.

Cale grinned and hit a chord. “Same reason as you.”

“To lose yourself.”

“To lose myself in music.”

“Is it working?”Aden turned to him and tapped a string.

“Does it ever, really?” Cale began. “It’s a distraction, that’s all, a drug more or less.  Maybe it makes me feel like I’m finally in control because I can create something out of nothing.  What is it with music anyway?  Is it like a conversation with someone who won’t disagree or judge, who will say exactly what you want to hear?”

“Maybe.  That’s why I write.”

“Maybe.” Cale set his guitar aside and thought it over. 

Music, more than anything else, really caught his passion and it’s what he wanted to do for a living, but he’d lost hope in going anywhere with it.  He felt mediocre, too dry at times, and he had no idea what steps to take to make it all a reality.  There were so many musicians out there more talented than he was or ever could be, a lot just as talented as any band who’d made it to the top, but fortune, like disease with population control, had a way of preserving the pyramid. 

Besides, music was too commercialized and too mainstream today; it was diluted by everyone’s ability to post and pan out anything they considered music online.  Plus, only flat tunes for sweaty grinding or bullshit lyrics written to insulate asphalt love gripes and petty dissatisfactions seemed to ride the tide.

“I just don’t know anymore Aden.  What is music, really?  What is creation for the creator?  I feel like I pick up the guitar with the intention to create but only the illusion that I am in control.”

“Maybe that’s the issue.”

“What?”

“Our obsession with control.  Maybe creating isn’t about just us presiding over what we create.  Perhaps, it’s more in the process of creation, of being a part of something, neither in a state of controlling or being controlled, that gives us that comfort in art.”

“I still feel like I’m a slave to it.” Cale eyed his guitar. “Simply because I’m attracted to it, I enjoy doing it, I find it beautiful.  I mean, you look at the symmetry in music alone and it’s hard not to wonder if it’s all just a game, as if we’ve been programmed to enjoy the patterns.”

“Maybe we are, but I’d rather be programmed to feel it than not and feel nothing at all.”

“But I want to come to find something beautiful on my own terms freely and not feel like I’m being forced into appreciating it.”

“I don’t think that’s what’s bothering you about beauty when it comes down to it.”

Cale turned to Aden, but he only sat there, legs dangling over the ledge, eyes neck-high in the tattoo stars. 

Over anything else, Cale envied Aden for his keen brilliance, his ability to stand on the edge of the world and pinpoint the obvious things overlooked and dismissed, the penny holes in the dam everyone else missed because they were too busy piling sandbags on the bank to counter the rain. 

“It’s not that you, or I, can’t control what we find beautiful,” Aden continued.  “It’s that we can’t control what others perceive or fail to see as beautiful.”

“I guess.”  It did bother Cale that music as an art, as a genuine form of expression, was losing ground to society, to convention, and the nonsense of materialism.  More and more music was being written for commercial jingles, TV theme songs, and video games.  School orchestras were drying up and choruses were singing Beyonce instead of Handel.  Times change, certainly, but they should progress, not sink.

“You and I came up here to get away from it all, through music, through the stars, through the beauty of a night different from all those gone and still to come for years and years and years.”  Aden eased himself off the ledge and lay back on the rooftop. “But most don’t understand, they don’t get it.  They rush off to work in their Cadillacs, busy themselves with bullshit like NFL stats and political rhetoric and gossip and crap TV, trade in a hike through the mountains for a treadmill… I just don’t get it Cale.”

Cale agreed, but Aden was rewiring the conversation, delving into the slivers of each and every aspect of this and that and this and that.  Sometimes he just couldn’t stand Aden’s rants, especially not with the dream still heavy on his mind and a desire to abandon the abstract cynicism and cut back to the here and now.

“To think,” Aden continued. “People are capable of going through each and every moment, but incapable of recognizing that the moment will never be more beautiful than it is right now in this very instance.”

“Yeah, I guess.”  Cale rattled off, half-annoyed.   Sometimes he felt belittled when he was with Aden.  Either Aden had to remind him directly through some comment he didn’t understand or indirectly with his outlier lectures or some egoistical side glance, his pupils rolling with arrogance underneath that humility he faked so easily.  A manipulator, that’s all he was, and a bloody hypocrite, reminding everyone they might sit on a throne but still on their own a*s while he stood on his head on his own throne.

What am I doing? Cale thought.  Letting the emotion drive nails through me.  Remnants of anger, that’s what it was, that’s why he was getting so up-tight with Aden.  He decided to pitch the snow globe and shift rails to rosin the conversation.

“Remember that nightmare I told you about when we were younger?  The one with the Pablo mission and everyone inside I ever knew dead?”

Aden remembered it well, but it wasn’t the nightmare itself that made him remember.  Instead, it was the onset of his first realization that he was alone on a burning stage staring down a non-existent audience while all around him the act continued in ignorant bliss.

‘… everyone was there, even you, even people I didn’t know but somehow felt were familiar, like I should have known them, or maybe I would someday know them…’

Cale continued on and on about it, his cigarette nearly out, his feet swinging off the far end of the dock, but the details evaporated in Aden’s mind before they could form puddles of memory.   He was miles high in anger, discontent, and depression, watching everyone else across the lake celebrating the start of their last year in high school, for what and why?  It was just another year in the grind mill then four more in some other sty, all to squeeze the last bit of kid out of you and qualify you as factory-made for the benefit of society.

What got him, though, was that while everyone else was busy boozing and flirting and trading gossip and wet dreams and bloated lies over drunk bonfire guitar, he and Cale spent the night on the dock swallowing the stars and the spaces in between.  Why couldn’t he dumb himself down like them?  Why couldn’t he stay so amused?

“Aden.”

“Yeah.”  He tripped down the stairwell and back into reality.

 “Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I had another one just like it.”

Aden waited for him to continue.

“Same in that lingering sense...”

Cale debated how to explain it and where to begin, deciding to cut to the chase and the lurid scene that bothered him most.

“I was on some beach walking toward these cliffs, but as I did a storm swelled up around me, the water following me as I ran up the shoreline.  I saw a gate in the cliff and ran for it, but it wouldn’t open.  Then, I swear I saw her.”

“Who?”  Aden asked, but he already knew who Cale was talking about.

 “I saw Aurora through the gate.  At first I didn’t recognize her.  She was in a white dress, walking away from me, and I called after to open the gate and let me in, but she didn’t say a thing.  Then, she grew old, started fading away, and when I turned around to point out the storm to her, it was gone, like it never happened, like it wasn’t ever there.”

Pausing for a moment, Cale tried to noose the words before he said them to keep the syllables from looping again in his head.

“I heard her whisper, and that’s what woke me up, the whisper, saying something like ‘You are the storm.’”

 “Did she ever say that to you before?”

“No.”

Cale always seemed to have these kind of dreams, Aden thought, where the feeling of it all was so real and the meaning metaphorical.  Aden, on the other hand, rarely dreamed and when he did, he was always torn out of them by some external noise or he could only remember bits in Crayola fragments that made about as much sense as a theme randomly strung together by articles plucked out of a dozen different magazines.

When he was a kid, he dreamed like no other.   Sometimes he suffered week long bouts of nightmares that pitted him into insomniac phases.  His father used to tell him stories before bed when he had the nightmares and leave the stories at cliffhangers, telling him to dream up the conclusion.  It took time, but it worked.

Aden couldn’t remember when the dreaming came to a standstill, he imagined it must have been gradual he just never noticed it until he would fall asleep, wake, fall asleep, wake, and never remember or notice anything in between.

“What do you think of it?” Cale asked.

Aden went through an obsessive phase in college over dream interpretations and lucid dreaming and tried to remember best he could the tall points of what he read.  Dreams could be the product of a number of things:  The brain on screen saver using memory and imagination as a palette to run frames in watercolor across the sleeping canvas, the mind trying to resolve underlying tension in imagery, or the subconscious rising to the surface and beading tension into meaning. 

“Not really sure.  Could be something under-the-skirt, your mind looking to quell this whole bit with Aurora and point out things you might not be completely aware of.  What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I have some thoughts about what it all might mean.”  Cale just wasn’t sure if he was even close to spot on and he was worried he was missing something key, something that could save him and Aurora. 

“Shoot.”

“Maybe I’ve started losing myself, you know.  I’ve stopped writing music, started drinking, second-guessing myself when I talk with her instead of just talking and being myself.  Maybe this whole fallout is the storm and I’m making it out to be worst than it really is.  She was probably just having a s**t day and pissed off at me for being sloshed, rightly so.”

“Could be.”  But Aden wasn’t so sure.  He saw the dream differently, the storm had come and it was too late.  Deciding not to dampen Cale’s mood, he dismissed his interpretation as wound-up cynicism and said nothing more.

“I think it is. It only makes sense that way, the storm, the fading away, her growing old, what she whispered.”  At first Cale was sure, but his words and thoughts sat at odds, and he found himself still completely uncertain. “Doesn’t it?”

He only needed Aden to agree, maybe that would set it all in stone.  If Aden said it was so, it had to be, or at least there was more of a chance that it could be.

“I guess.”

I guess…  Cale could only guess.  He supposed it was better than nothing and turned away.  Silence ensued and the two strayed into rye fields dew-stricken by their own separate thoughts.  It was insane, Aden observed, that we coexist, sit so close, come to know each other so well, and yet, remain strangers at the heart of it all.

Cale was elsewhere, visually distracted by the lampshade night and blotch-work stars.  He wondered if the storm and her walking away pointed to something else.  Maybe Aurora had never really loved him, at least not as deeply as he loved her.  Perhaps it was only the idea of him or who she thought he was.  Either way, he was afraid the puddle was now bone dry, the cove clean of salt, and their love was simply a fossil in memory, nothing more, nothing less.

Sighing, Cale picked up his guitar, fretting the strings to grave-dig a metallic ring and shake the dust out of the silence.  He thought about his past flings.  Some were only names, a few nights, a smile, a naked body stripped in moonlight.  He wondered why none of them drew him in like Aurora, why it was so easy to make casual newspaper love to some, pile them up out back, and just walk away while others became special, beyond the ordinary.  

None were like Aurora.  None had made him fall so hard.  And none had ever walked away on him.  Injury to his pride, he now assumed, it was only natural to tell himself there was no love left between them, to conjure up a storm.   It was simply a defense mechanism for a zeppelin mind pissed off at being rooted for so long in something it couldn’t box and cookie cut. 

Convinced he’d hit the nail head-on, Cale resolved to take it easy, stop working up a riot, and remember that Aurora was probably only going through a rough time.  Besides, no woman had ever walked out on him before, he called the shots, and he couldn’t imagine that ever changing.

“I think I’m going to hit the rack.” Cale noted and stood.

“Everything alright now?”

“Like what we talked about.  Only a bump in the road.  I’m bringing on my own storm.”

Aden nodded, draping a slight smile, complacent with the idea that at least one of them had seemingly pinned the tail on the elephant in the room.

“You staying up here?”

“For a bit longer.”

Cale bid him goodnight and started back down the stairwell when Aden suddenly called after him.

“Cale.”

Aden caught his stare as he pivoted in the doorway.  To think, nine years ago they were kids with dreams and aspirations, sitting on the dock for the first time, waiting to grow up, and watching the sun sink without a damn care in the world beyond their small town.  But they were older now, in love, struggling just to keep afloat, and wishing they were still back there on that dock, going down with the sun and not a single, heavy worry on their mind.

 “With Aurora, did you ever feel like you were trying to be who you thought she expected you to be?”

“Sometimes.”  It had crossed Cale’s mind before, but he’d never slowed it down and shuffled through the implications of what it meant.  “It’s not a bad thing if it brings out the best in you.  Plus, it keeps us on our toes.”

“I suppose.  I just feel so caught up in expectation now, of what it should be, who I should be, who she should be.”

“Don’t think so deeply.  She fell in love with who you are.”

“I try not too but you know me.” Aden started. “I wasn’t where I am at now when I was in love before.  It’s harder.  Love comes off like glitter.  A hormonal puncture wound in my sanity.”

“Let it bleed Villon.  I don’t want to sound cold, but for all the talk you do about the now, you waste so much of it asking questions.”

Juggled slightly by Cale’s comment, Aden pulled himself up and leaned over the ledge.  He did ask too many questions at times, but did that make it a crime?  If the rest of the world sat down and took the time to critically think about the absurdity of war, of poverty, of money, of religion-

“You’re thinking too much again.”  Cale sighed. 

“Expectation destroys us.”

“If you let it.”

“I suppose.”

“You know you expect too much out of yourself Aden.”

“I know.”

Cale watched Aden wrestle with the chimera in his mind.  He never did change.  Even as a kid Aden sat around picking up the whys behind everything.   Cale only wanted to know the big picture.  Where we came from?  What it all meant?  With Aurora he stopped caring, she showed him it didn’t matter, we would never know, and there was no point trampling on hot coals that would never grow cold.  But, if this really was it between them, what then?

“Maybe we should go away this weekend.  Cal was telling me about this aquarium in Busan where you can shark dive for dirt cheap.  Wouldn’t be a bad gig.”

“We should.  God knows we both need a sabbatical.”

“Sabbatical it is.  I’ll book it tomorrow.”

“Sounds good.”

Aden sat on the rooftop long after Cale left, the unbroken copy of the book he picked lying next to him, its cover cross gold in the starlight.

How could he let expectation go now?  If he opened the book and nothing was penned on the sleeve, what would it all mean?  Anything?  Only a hack tilted meaning in whether or not something like serendipity had anything to do with the future.  The trouble was, he knew that if he cracked open the book, no matter what he found, it would break or set a new ledger of expectations.

Only a hack…

Damn thinking about what was or could be or will be or should be.  It’s expectation that ruins us, constantly pinning us on some tightrope where we study the bone past in our left hand while trying to chalk up a hewn ivory future in the right, the balance cracked because we can’t focus and let go. 

Shoshanna had fallen in love with who he was, he supposed, but who was that?  The cynic who rolled over and played dead, the dreamer who set visions in snow only to watch them melt, the thinker who never took a step anymore because he couldn’t find a reason to care or try. 

There are never any expectations at the start, but they’re bound to grow like weeds in a garden over time.  He couldn’t give her the security she needed or the comfort in being.  He had no idea who he was or what he would do with his life, not even come tomorrow let alone today.  Only the road and nowhere gave him the solace the walls of a stone home in a familiar world seemed to always choke out of him.  A man like him wasn’t born to commit.  He had to let her go.  Sometimes, he supposed, true love is leaving behind what you will only end up hurting in the end.      

Aden fought against checking the time on his cell phone, no longer wanting to bother with the book, but while his thoughts begged him not to martyr caution, some ounce of heavy water underneath shoved his hand into his pocket and the other against the cover of the paperback. 

Three minutes until.

He wondered what book she picked, if she’d opened it already, if she was right.  Bits and pieces of what he wrote came to back him and he wondered what she’d think of it.  It amused him to think about what he told her the first night they met, how he loved to write because he felt like he was in control.  Some switch must have been kicked and kicked hard to say what he did tonight about writing to Cale.  It was true what he’d said about art as a component of being.  He wasn’t in control when he wrote the poem in the sleeve of The Fountainhead for Shoshanna.  The words slid out of him, the inexpressible in hand, the feelings finally bound as best they could be in something as gossamer as language.  It was like he’d managed to paint the dark side of the moon he couldn’t see but knew was there.    

What if she didn’t understand or feel the same?  What if she took it the wrong way? What if-

Damn, there I go again, Aden thought. Catching himself midway through all those what ifs, he shoved the book aside and lay back against the concrete.

Suddenly, his phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket.  It was Shoshanna.

-I don’t know what to do.  I don’t think I can go on like this.

Aden sat up and read the text over a few times, trying to pick out the edges and figure out what she was trying to say.

-What do you mean?

-I just don’t think I can go on.

Worried about what she might mean, Aden tried calling her several times but it only went to her voicemail.  He decided to catch a cab to her flat and stood up, eying the paperback on the rooftop one last time, his shadow crucified against its sleeve.  He’d open it later, maybe, but whatever was in there couldn’t clutter his attic mind, not now.

Twenty minutes later, he double-timed up her stairwell and knocked on her door, but she wouldn’t answer.

“Shoshanna?”

Nothing.

“You know I won’t leave.  I’ll sit out here if I have to.”

Still nothing.

He tore a page out of his journal, chalked her a note, and slid it under the door before sliding down against the side wall to wait.  For a minute or so, he didn’t hear her move, then soft footsteps and the shuffle of paper. 

“Shoshanna, I’ll sit in the ditch with you if that’s what you need, we don’t even have to say anything.”

Still, she said nothing. 

Imagining the worst, Aden clambered to the rooftop and leaned over the ledge, guessing at which window might be hers.  It was a wild move and quite a gamble with everything still slick from last night’s rain, but he scratched it all and eased himself down the gutter pipe and onto her window sill.  He could see all her books and clothes scattered about the room through the crack in the kitchen sliding door and climbed through the window.

There, with her face buried in a damp pillow, lay Shoshanna in a wreck.  He crossed the room  and knelt beside her, his hand gently brushing back her hair.

“I’m here.”

Her crying eased as she reached for his hand.

“You shouldn’t be…”

“I want to be.”

“I’m just afraid of it all.”  She began, turning towards him. “Of falling again, becoming my mother, letting you down.”

“Don’t be.” Was all he had to say, all he needed to say.

Laying down beside her, he flipped off the lamp beside the bed, and together they drifted away from all the hurt, thoughts, and expectations of the iron press world seemingly closing in around them.  But neither noticed the paperback on the floor, its sleeve tucked under its body, and the crow ink inside catching the city lights in slow strides like a totentanz, coffin lining at a wake, a dream pang-