Ana rolls onto her side, peels the comforter off of her torso, and lies there waiting to feel November fall into her skin. She lies there half exposed beneath the mound of blankets until she is certain that this is what cold feels like, before she begins to move about her room, carefully pulling on sweatpants and socks over the sensitive terrain of her body. She passes the two closed doors on her way to the bathroom.
He was sitting in a cage at a table in the corner of the room. Two women were at his side. People gawked at him. One woman yelled “don’t stick your fingers in!” to a kid from Thinktank. The kid had a yellow notepad with ART MUTTERS on the cover and was writing all the valuable things that fell out of the woman’s mouth. Pam stared at Pockets as he scratched his white beard. She turned red and thought about doing something terrible to Karen. Pam looked at a few more paintings above the food table where a tureen of red punch glistened, tapping a pen on her palm. She poured some punch into a glass and almost drank it before she noticed shit or hay was floating in it.
There had been two large bags of fan mail waiting for him beside the piano bench after the accident. At first, he had little interest in being prayed for. But at four in the morning when his hand throbbed and his absent thumb, by now decaying in some medical dump, ached and itched uncontrollably, he found them an entertaining distraction.
I feel the laughter echo inside the hollow walls of my stomach. It bubbles out from between my pursed lips. On the phone Annie had said that she’d be here waiting for me. At the time, with the freshly falling snow outside my bedroom window, I believed her or wanted to, anyways.
It’s not David. This man is too young, far too young, but he has David’s blond hair, flopping over his forehead the way it used to when they first met, with David’s old smile. She stops and a cold metal bar rams into the back of her ankle. Her legs buckle.
Charlie had always loved the night and the city. At one time, albeit many years before, he had taken part in every night out, every silly escapade. In his recollection, though, that era seemed very brief, and he had quickly turned the page and landed a serious job, to which he had chained himself in a frenzy to succeed, becoming in his friends’ eyes an aloof and calculating person, constantly in a rush.