For a year, we tracked the data:
We ran the numbers and met to discuss costs and benefits.
The numbers did not lie. Unless we forgot a variable, we love each other very much.
She took a step, expecting firm ground, and everything shifted beneath her. She caught herself out of the careen, but knew she would never again feel quite the same, quite so steady on her feet, quite so certain that each step along the path was meant to happen as she’d mapped them out.
Down deep, there is something so strange, something so devoured, something so rotten that, on certain days, when the wind comes from a certain direction, I can smell it. I hope the others don’t notice, but rather that they continue their polite interaction, their polite embraces, their polite clinging to society and its proscriptions.
I want to be that angel, she thought as she leaned against the bar. The dance floor was so big, and her shoes felt too big for her feet. Instead she reached for the matchbook, ripped off the matches one by one, dipping them in a pool of condensation on the bar so they could never, ever be lit.
The subject line led with “My mother” and followed with her name. She was one of my grandmother’s stalwart friends, a hard job on a good day, and though my mother is the one who has contact with her still, the thought that she might be gone caught me at the throat.
The message body revealed she was only in the hospital. “When I saw the subject line, I thought she had died,” I wrote back to my mother.
“Me too,” she said, her lack of an email sign-off telling me all I needed to know.
From the roof of the parking garage, she could see directly into his office window.
“Are you sure?” asked her friend.
She nodded, the softball nestled in her palm. “No question about it,” she replied.
The two with suitcases knocked the peppershaker off the table on their way out.
“I can’t drink whiskey,” said the man, reaching for her hand. “It makes me clumsy.”
They continued leaving together, too accident-prone to pretend they were apart.
100 Proof 