100 Proof

After awhile, he forgot whether he was holding up the tree, or the tree was holding him steady. They had become almost the same, at least where his shoulder touched the bark. He had expected her to meet him here, thinking this would be the night when they finally rooted their relationship in something beyond imagination, but now she was nearly an hour late, and she was always on time to the things she valued.

Beneath him, the ground had grown spongy and uncertain. Above him, the branches spread wide, leafless petitioners to the starless night sky.

It was all reflected there: her red coat, her black pants, her slightly disheveled hair, the way her eyes shifted as if she were alert, always, to possible attacks. She had once been someone who stood up straight, but now her shoulders hunched, her body curled around its own soft places.

She did not like standing near mirrored walls, but the line snaked past this one, and today she had no choice. She tried not to look at the twin of herself, carrying the same slightly crumpled application, the same notebook filling up with rejection and missed opportunity.

Though many feet had packed the snow on the bridge, her boots still slipped. I might fall, she said. Then what will you do?

He looked at her as if she had missed everything he’d said for weeks. Do you think I’d leave you here in the cold?

She thought about what it would feel like to lie there on her back for the rest of the evening, the pinprick of snowflakes falling onto her cheeks from dull orange clouds above.

I don’t, she said, and she twirled then, safe in the knowledge of what would happen next.

Across the river rose the steel and glass containers of all those colder lives. She marched along the opposite bank, the sun at her back, refusing to look over there, where no one was friendly. Once, she had been one of them, nails painted a cool shade, hair precisely bobbed. But one night, she raised a glass at a dinner party and it shattered in her hand, as if the air itself had grown too hard. She knew had to leave immediately, and she left a trail of blood on the brushed concrete floor as she departed.

She left home before dawn, driving down lanes between fields, alongside vineyards. She drove until nature gave way to wood and concrete, until buildings embraced her car. Only then did she park and emerge. The air smelled of exhaust and mud and baking bread and coffee and the cologne of the man rushing by her, and she breathed it in as if it were opportunity.

She flung her arms wide open to the city street. This, she said, this is what I have been waiting for all along.

There is a precise way one sits when waiting for coffee, if one is certain about one’s life. One folds one’s hands, like so. One keeps one’s head tilted, like so. To deviate before the arrival of the mug (and one picks one’s diner based on the type of mug used, of course) would be to broadcast that one has lost control over the things most important, over the decisions that direct this outcome, that contingency, as one measures all the steps that carry one through a good and honest life.

She set a bottle free on the water’s surface, watched it float away. She had wanted to put a message inside it, something short, something directing the person who found it to reach out to her, but when it came time to put words to the paper, she had none to spare.

A boy down the river fished out the bottle, turned it over in his hands. He had long been looking for a message, something that would explain the world he saw around himself, but once again, there were no answers, just echoes from within the hollow glass.