He pulled out her chair, then demanded a kiss, and she turned him down. His shirt was red as a bullfighter’s cape, and she wished he’d worn something less gaudy.
It was only later, with his forearm across her throat, his mouth hard on hers, that she realized she should have never gone out with him in the first place.
Her eyes darted to one side, then the other, looking for escape. Clouds passed overhead. Stars remained obscured. It was almost the darkest night of the year.
There’s no telling what might happen when the wind blows that way. Up high, there may be snow. Down low, the leaves rush away. The wind brings cold and longing and something worse. The wind changes everything.
The I-walls in New Orleans couldn’t hold back the floods. They weren’t deep enough, they weren’t strong enough, they weren’t steady enough.
There were those engineers that knew the walls couldn’t handle it.
If I had to guess, I’d say there are many of those engineers who have seen their relationships fail, their lives disintegrate, and have had to move to temporary housing. If I had to guess, I’d say they probably never connected their home and their work.
Each time I opened the door, the flowers were the first thing I smelled, their fragrance filling the room just lightly enough that I wanted them to stay always.
Yet, it became clear to me, as I woke up weeping for the third morning in a row, that they were too much. They had overwhelmed my eyes’ defenses.
“Thank you for not running,” he said.
She had one eye on the door, though. One eye on the door at all times. It was best, she had learned, to keep an escape route handy.
She peered down the street from the top of the hill, imagining her feet slapping the sidewalk, the reverberations up into her hips.
She knew the speed would overtake her, the momentum pulling her down to the end of the street, her pace completely out of her control.
She knew she might lose her footing, tumble, scraping bare skin and bruising elbows and knees along the way. She might hit her head.
She started running anyway.
He agreed, against his better judgment, to meet her for coffee. Outside, rain washed the street.
“Why did you take me to bed?” she asked. “You knew I’d fall.”
He took one cube of sugar from the bowl, stirred it into the tiny cup of espresso. He liked things concentrated and not too sweet.
“You knew where the door was,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to be unkind.”
He left her there staring at the residue in his cup, the lemon twist on the saucer.
100 Proof 