She preferred intervals to long distances, moving fast, then slow, rather than holding a consistent pace that eventually bored her. Long ago, she’d found she got further without meaning to by following this pattern.
“How do you do it all?” her friends asked, and she smiled, thinking of all the walking she did between sprints. It was secret, this walking. It was better they didn’t know about it, anyway.
“Oh, I’m babbling,” said the older man at the bar swirling his white wine. “You should feel free to tell me if I should be quiet.”
“Well, I’ve been meaning to practice my skills in that area,” said the buxom bartender.
“I’m not the kind of guy that minds if a woman talks back to him,” the man said. “I long ago realized that most of us behave very badly.”
Two weeks ago, I dreamed of the city rising, but gated, padlocked, fenced at every turn. To gain access anywhere, I had to climb. Each time I reached the other side of a fence, the ground fell away where I had just been. There was no going back.
Last year’s stories are not this year’s, and dust has no control over where wind shifts it. But specks of my heart remain on the wrong side of the fence. I turn, clutch the mesh, and look for them, down into the gaping space of what used to be.
At the horizon, sailboats circled each other like dancing girls, leaning into wind that billowed their skirt-like sails. They had found the one place where the sun punched through the fog, and from the bridge, it appeared as if their patch of ocean was another country, one where life is a little brighter, a little slower.
Ahead, the city lay shrouded from summer by a layer of clouds, and cars moved faster than boats. Drivers furrowed their foreheads as the wind buffeted their vehicles. They had their chosen roads. They did not wish to be wind-driven.
“I had a drink that I liked,” he said. “I think it was called the Earth and Sand.”
“Blood and Sand?” I asked.
“Maybe that’s it,” he said. “I guess earth and sand are the same.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “It’s all a matter of particulate and size.”
She asked him to take her to Bar Adagio. She didn’t know anything about it, but it sounded like the right place to have a languorous cocktail, to wind their fingers around each other’s and talk low. But it turned out to be just like any bar, and when she went to freshen up in the bathroom, he ordered her a glass of wine instead of a martini. Later, her eyelids heavy with disappointment, she called herself a cab and left, her only wish that the driver would take the corners faster, the straightaways more aggressively.
“I hope I don’t run into him,” I said. “I really don’t want to see him again.”
“You won’t,” she said. “But if you keep thinking you will, you know what will happen.”
“I don’t think I will,” I said.
“You need to believe it, though,” she said. “The universe knows when you’re lying to it.”
100 Proof 