California is Burning

By A.E. Bayne

A great, hot tongue swept through the valley on the television screen. The flat panel reflected the plate glass window opposite the plush leather couches, and in it the slightly pretentious orchids dangling lazily over the lip of a vase on the table. What was she thinking? The day had ended like any other: a stop at the grocery, she picked up the kids. Brian would be home soon. And yet, she lay draped on the couch while her children mocked one another in a far room. She heard them through a food binge induced haze.

The flames on the screen lapped massive chunks of vegetation, and sizzling spittle dropped like hellish dandelion fluff igniting eager infants. She watched it cloning its image in the window, superimposed upon the city beyond. There was fire everywhere, but she lay cold and was nothing. In fact, as she listened to Kevin call Allie a cry-baby, and heard Allie’s whiney screech in retaliation, she thought that her blood might have actually stopped in her veins as she blanketed the cool leather.

On the table lay a container of Hagaan Daz, a bag of Red Hot and Blue Chips, an orange, and a plate that had, until five minutes ago, contained leftover chicken cordon blue. She let her eyes roll over the empty packages as the fire raged behind an anchorman who was reporting from the shell of his burned out home. She should get up and throw away the evidence, before Brian got home, before the kids came out into the room. She should get up and move like a torch through the house, cleansing it of rubbish. She should.

Many days had passed since her blood had boiled over. Her anguish had seared her fellow mourners at the funeral parlor. It had been Brian’s idea. For over a year, she’d been trying to spark her creativity and move her life in the direction she’d originally planned. She fought ennui every step of the way. Brian had suggested a funeral to put to rest her old life.

They had rented out a funeral parlor in town. The funeral director balked at the idea of holding a fake funeral. He’d told Brian that it would give clients the wrong idea, that they’d think the morticians didn’t take their jobs seriously. However, when Brian offered to pay dearly and had promised to recommend their services to his own clients, the funeral director agreed on the condition that he would not play any of the traditional roles that he usually held within the funerals at his discretion. Brian explained that he would not be needed, that he and their family and friends would take care of everything.

Brian had branded the funeral into her mind. He’d prodded her to write down all the details of her old life that she wanted to change. She repeatedly told him that she didn’t want to let go of everything in her old life. There were things that she wanted to remember and reflect upon. Once Brian caught hold of an idea though, he ran with it until it was fired on the very fabric of their lives. Down to the last detail, Brian peppered her with questions. Exhausted, she answered each one. Answering was easier than arguing.

Two weekends ago, in the small front parlor of the funeral space, she and twenty five of their closest friends had joined in the strangest ceremony she’d ever attended. There in the oaken coffin in the front of the parlor lay a myriad of photographs from her life up to that point. Mixed with the photos were note cards listing her various accomplishments and foibles, written by friends and family and a few by her own hand. She watched and listened as people she’d known for years went to the podium to talk about experiences they’d had together. After each person spoke, Brian extinguished one of the candles that lined the perimeter of the coffin. When everyone in the room had spoken their peace, she rose like a slow flame and trudged to the podium. Brian took her arm and looked at her expectantly. The room was an airless tomb as the audience held their breath as one.

Weightless and dancing in their sparkling eyes, she spoke about her life. She told of the early years in Wisconsin, the memories of skating on frozen lakes and an uncle who’d made her feel filthy simply by looking at her with possession in his eyes.

She explained how she’d been named the salutatorian of her high school class, but had developed an addiction to pharmaceutical grade opiates during her summer stint at the local pharmacy before leaving for college. It had been hard to procure the pharmaceuticals on campus, so she had switched to street grade heroin and the occasional tablet of oxycontin when she could get it.

She spoke of her passion for textiles and design, how she felt like a failure for not pursuing her dreams, and how her family was both the most important and the most stressful part of her existence. She related how Brian buried her with his smothering, unremitting air of professional authority that translated to their lives at home, their sex life, their friends; they were all his.

She looked out at the crowd, breathing her smoke, brushed with the ashes of her life. What had they expected? Had they wanted her to simply breeze through her stories and leave out the scorching details? Her finishing words were cataclysmic, clearing the room of all but Brian, a petrified form on the chair directly in front of her.

“You didn’t even ask me if I wanted this,” she had said, exhausting the last flickering light in the row of candles.

Now, soaking in the guilt and rage that consumed her, she pointed the remote at the television and extinguished the bright fires that lay bare the land’s bones.

“Enough,” she said.

I once knew a guy...

By A.E. Bayne

Certain people impact our lives without even meaning to do so. They are not people with whom we share childhood memories, become close friends, nor good neighbors; rather, they are those who drop into our lives, seemingly from the ether, and blow our minds, cascading us forward toward a new way of thinking or understanding. They have come into my life, these unlikely guides. There was the rebellious nun, Sr. Helen, who saved my soul after a serious bout of clinical depression during my freshman year in high school. In Blacksburg, it was Tim, a graduating college senior, so terrified of what lay ahead of him that he teetered in the moment by talking with me for four hours about Buddhism on a knoll overlooking College Avenue. Later, Rebecca, the chain smoking psychic, taught me about grieving one evening over beading and beer. Then, there was this man.

I once knew a guy named Jimmy Kola, a man with considerable charisma seasoned with a hint of insanity. Jimmy was a shaman of sorts, playing surf music for the local college radio station into the wee hours of the morning, and eeking out a living by trading his jewelry and doing odd jobs around town. He was a person whom I understood immediately would be an adventure in the knowing.

To the casual observer, Jimmy looked like a resplendently bejeweled and wildly hirsute counterculture hippy: the Green Man incarnate. A highly decorated soldier of the Wastelands, Jimmy wove bracelets up his arms and hung heavy contraptions of copper and clay from his neck. Multicolored tribal beads and copper twining linked the piercings that perforated his earlobes to his prominently bushy beard. On any given day, one might watch him pedal his battered and buckling bicycle barefoot through the center of town. I never saw him with shoes on, even when he came into the co-op for food. Jimmy’s clothes were always a mish-mash of textures and styles: one day a faded flannel shirt and dirt smudged chinos; another, a dashiki and shredded denim shorts. Whatever the fashion, he was instantly recognizable, even as he remained on society’s fringe.

Jimmy ran with the Kola family, jewelry makers by trade, a nomadic group. Legend had it that the family had been living out of authentic teepees in the mountains of West Virginia, but Jimmy ended up in Kent after hooking up with a cat named Jexo who ran a local art gallery, drum circle and children’s theater. Sometimes Jexo would take off for Maine or Canada to pick blueberries with the migrant workers, and Jimmy would join him for the extra cash and commradare. Or maybe it was the other way around, being that Jimmy was the nomad of the two. Jimmy’s family travelled through Kent from time to time, but most often he maintained an active social life with people from the co-op and shops in town.



I first met Jimmy while working behind the counter at
Kent Natural Food Cooperative. Already a familiar member of the co-op’s inner circle, he padded in on dusty feet one day to collect profits for his jewelry that was on display. The jewelry in the case had ensnared me on my first visit to the co-op, intricate pieces wrought with a heavy hand and an eye for detail. Copper coils deftly encircled rough agate and crystal stones, snaking back and looping through subtly mottled earth colored beads. The pieces were not gaudy, yet they had presence. Perhaps it was the natural elements; or perhaps it was the hand that crafted them, for Jimmy oozed a kind of sensual natural grace and wisdom. In any case, I was inspired by the jewelry, wanted to purchase a piece for myself, and was awed by the man who had dreamed and designed the artistic loops and twirls that gleamed under the glass countertop.

We didn’t talk about anything significant during our first encounter, though I did let him know that I admired his artwork and would like to eventually buy a piece for myself. The hair on Jimmy’s face shifted about and I knew that he was smiling appreciatively. He took the money from his recent sale out of the cash register and bought a few sparse groceries, some hummus and fruit, a little bread. I watched as he stopped in the back room to chat with Brian and Amie, both of whom knew him well.

The next time Jimmy came in, he struck up a conversation with me about organic fruit versus farm grown fruit. He told me about how satisfying it was to work with the migrant farmers harvesting berries, though the work was difficult and the hours long. I noticed how toned and sinewy his leg and arm muscles were, likely due to the physical labor of pedaling around town and working with the copper in the jewelry, in addition to laboring during the harvesting season. Eventually, and after numerous visits, Jimmy’s magnetism became such a potent force for me, that one day when he came into the co-op I nearly fell on the floor in a swoon. To me, he was simply dynamic.

Jimmy was the last person I saw when I left Kent. My soon to be ex-husband had travelled back to town after an extended trip to his future home in Arizona to help me pack up the moving van that would take my son and me to Virginia. While he and Xaviar were inside packing and cleaning, Jimmy rode by the house and circled the street in front of the driveway two times. I waved to him. He raised his hand lazily and continued down the street toward the center of town.

Now, I realize that none of this seems especially riveting or life altering, but knowing Jimmy for this brief time left me with something that I carry to this day: I am a wild woman at heart. For many years, my untamed self fought with tradition, enraging me and causing me deep and silent distress. Insecurities and self-doubt ripped through me on a daily basis. And while most of the people that I met while I lived in Kent helped me realize my true self through their examples of alternative and cooperative living, it was Jimmy Kola, in all his weird organic beauty, who became locked in my mind as the ultimate example of how to be true to one’s self. I keep two bracelets and a necklace that Jimmy made because they remind me of whom I really am, even as I traipse around in this other world.

Barometric Pressures

By A.E. Bayne

“Temperatures are hovering in the teens, winds moving out of the southwest at 30 mph. This storm we’re tracking is setting up to be a monster, so we advise people in the viewing area to take precautions when going out in the morning. Stay indoors if you don’t absolutely have to get out in this mess.”

Snow. That’s what Tad the weatherman just predicted, and a lot of it. Tad! What a jerk-off name. Thaddeus is even worse. Thaddeus Van Hoffenberg. I went to school with good ol’ cock- of- the- walk Tad.

“Ptew!”

I spit at the screen. The gelatinous loogie made a slug trail across Tad’s affable face. What an asshole. Every week, end upon end, I’ve watched his bullshit weather reports, craving some continuity, longing for a modicum of accuracy. Is it such an enormous thing to ask for a weather report upon which I can rely; to be told, “Yes, rain tomorrow, a 50% chance of showers in the morning, ending by noon,” and then to actually wake to rain sloshing through my gutters; to whistle while I pull on my Gortex raincoat and unfurl my golf-sized umbrella with the Sunday Times printed on it? I don’t think it is.

I didn’t always feel this way about Tad, truly. Tad was an amiable guy through school, if a bit simple. He was an average Joe, making his way through the daily montage of gossip, teen angst, and jockstrap noogies in the locker room. He and I were even lab partners during our year in chemistry class. When I saw the screen pan over to him while watching the weather last year, my initial thought was one of gleeful surprise; hey, I knew that guy, Tad.

Tad had developed a certain charisma in the years between high school and his career in meteorology. Gone were the wiry glasses and forehead pimples, the too-long pieces of stubble and the mottled cheeks. No, this new Tad was tan and bleach-tipped, with sparkling green eyes and DayGlo dentures. This tad wore Armani and spoke with the crisp accentless dialect of a newscaster. He gestured fluidly to the green screen behind him, flawlessly pointing to Colorado, then Michigan, then Florida. This Tad spoke with authority, the voice of the gods, “The weather tomorrow will be…” And so it was, for a while.

I remember Tad’s first miscalculation last spring because I felt it as keenly as if it had been a personal affront. It was early April and I had plans to go golfing with my father who was battling esophageal cancer. Dad had just come through a second round of chemo in January, and he was gradually feeling steadier on his feet. Instead of wallowing in lethargy on the sofa each day as he had since the chemo ended, he had started to travel around a bit in the house over the past week, moving from room to room with the padded shuffle of his Dearfoams. I thought it might be beneficial to his spirits to take him over to the golf course for a half an hour, drive him around and let him watch me knock a few across the greens. He was up for it, so we flicked Tad’s report on the night before we headed out and hoped for the best. Tad was on our side, for he forecast clear skies and a light crisp breeze to temper the 80 degree day. Dad smiled; I smiled; Tad beamed.

The next morning, light filtered in through the curtains in the kitchen window, projecting a lacy pattern on the countertop to its left. I peeked outside and was satisfied. There were a few stray clouds playing tag across the saturated sky, but none looked a threat. I gathered Dad’s catheter bag and I.V. stand, helped him on with his windbreaker and brown felt fedora, and we made our way out to the car gingerly, tentatively.

We drove in relative silence, only remarking that we lucked out with the weather. Closer to the golf course I shot a wary eye out the window, for the random playful clouds of just an hour before were gathering like gawkers at a crime scene, joining and breaking, then rejoining the fray. Dad noticed my nervous glances and sucked in his breath in disgust.

“Damn,” he cursed.

“Naw, Dad, come on. Tad reported clear skies. They’re just passing clouds. Hey, every cloud and silver linings and all that. Maybe it won’t be so hot.”

Dad nodded furtively, bobbing his head at uneven intervals, his I.V. bag bouncing with each movement.

I pulled up to the front portico of the club and a staff member rolled a wheelchair to the passenger door. After a bit of lifting and positioning, we had the chair, catheter bag, I.V. bag and my father situated. I tilted my head up to the sky to witness grey nimbus clouds blending with the crisp white borders of their cumulus cousins.

“Did the forecast change?” I asked the staff member, Chip.

“Not that I know of,” he said, “Last night they called for clear skies.”

“Who called for clear skies?” I asked.

“Excuse me?” He looked perplexed.

“Who, exactly, called for clear skies last night?” I pointedly stared into his quizzical eyes.

“Um, you know, the guy, the one on the weather.”

He turned to push my father up the wheelchair ramp.

“You mean Tad.”

“What?”

“Tad, the guy, the one on the weather,” I mimicked back.

Chip furrowed his brow, cocked his head and curled his lip, “Um, yeah, that one.”

Tad! I expelled his name like a curse. How could he? He knew my father. He’d been to my house, for god’s sake. How could he come out with such an undeniably wrong forecast? Was this some kind of sick joke? My face grew hot and I hugged my arms tight across my stomach with elbows grasped.

“Let it go,” my father said softly.

Chip waited for me to follow. My father’s pleading gaze pulled me up the ramp to fall in step, and I acquiesced out of respect for his condition.

By the time we rolled Dad across the club’s foyer and into the restaurant that overlooked the outside dining area and greens, large drops had begun to plop onto the flagstone between the stately covered tables. We decided to wait it out for a bit, but my father’s strength waned and he soon asked to go home. It was the last time he left the house until the day the ambulance carried him to the hospital to die.

Now, you could make the case that anyone can make a mistake. Meteorologists are often sketchy at best with their predictive powers. I ask you to consider this though: with all of the technology that backed Tad Van Hoffenberg, how could he have called a perfect day from what turned out to be a 48 hour deluge resulting in mudslides, flooded streets, and downed power lines? What act of God materialized out of the miasma of the cosmos to turn Tad into such a charlatan?

Unfortunately for Tad and everyone in our viewing area, this was only his first of many faulty predictions.

The summer following the golfing disaster, Tad called bright skies and balmy breezes on July 4th. Multitudes gathered at the local soccer fields to watch rockets flare and to barbecue with family and friends. At approximately 8:45 P.M., lightning shot across the sky, first at some distance and then closer, painting the sky a crackle glass finish. The crowd darted across the open fields like mice in lamplight, but the lightning took no prisoners. In just twenty minutes, four people died and ten others were seriously burned by Thor’s wrath. The next day, Tad was back on the television giving an ambiguously technical explanation of the freak storm. Atmospheric conditions right for the event my ass! You made a mistake, Tad! Just admit it.

In September of the same year, Tad showed graph after graph of hurricanes through the ages, explaining that conditions were primed for it to be one of the worst tropical weather seasons in recent history, if not all of recorded history. In fact, he said, the storm center was tracking a behemoth as he spoke. The camera switched to a monitor showing a swirling vortex off the Atlantic coastline, barreling toward Cuba. Tad recommended that people living in coastal areas flock to the stores like so many flamingos and buy all manner of supplies and lumber to barricade their homes and stock their pantries. Lowes and Home Depot sold out of plywood and Duct tape in three days. Grocery store shelves were bare of milk, bread, and eggs. News broadcasters jumped on the lead, sending up-and-coming reporters to the east edge of America to be buffeted by gale-force winds and whipped by sheets of rain and hail. Then, nothing. We waited, holed up in our houses with candles and generators ready. The storm never came.

Tad explained the next day that the storm had decidedly turned north, fickle sea anomaly that it was, and would coast its way up toward Nova Scotia over the course of the next two days. The meteorologists in New England would take it from here. Smile. No worries. Grin. Wow, we really dodged that one. Chuckle.

Lowe’s would not take my plywood back, and the extra milk and eggs I bought with my last $20.00 went bad.

Tad!

I considered that there might be others like me; people who were frustrated by Tad’s ineptitude at weather prognostication. I flew to the Internet, searching for chat rooms with names like “Tad the Big Turd” or “Townies against Tad.” I found only two negative comments about Tad’s weather forecasting: one from a woman who didn’t like the way he pronounced her home town, and another from a viewer who commented on the number of times that Tad used the words “weather event” during a show. While I have to agree that the latter complaint was fair, it didn’t support my vehement feelings of disenfranchisement and injustice in light of what was supposed to be a higher power that was in the know about all things weather related.

Since September, Tad has made a few minor weather faux pas: a miss on a first frost that cost the orange growers millions, a snow shower that turned to rain, and a month of warmer than usual dry weather that contributed to two out of control brush fires. But now, he is back to his old grandiose predictions. A blizzard of the century such as we have not seen in our generation. Snow up to window sills; roads closed for days. Stock up on fire wood. Pull out those old generators from September. Buy the milk; buy the eggs. Bring in your pets. SNOW!

I open my front door and breath deep the winter night. The scent from the moldy, ashen leaves tingles in my nose, and a waxing gibbous bobs high above the trees. There are clouds, streaming in from the distance like smoke from chimneys. Their tendrils are spider legs stroking the sky, crawling forward and pulling the larger front that follows. Tad, could you be on to something? I close the door and consider the alternative. We are all just gods in our own right.

Genus Species Class

Resonating deep between the broken glass trinkets, there sat a bold beauty who flashed no grin at the people walking by in a slow procession beyond the rip in her universe. Her infinitesimal, upturned sensory mechanisms quivered at the pungent bite of designer perfumes rising through the air like humid pockets of putridity. Zap! The scents tingled her spine down to her appendages, tittering fingers that ran to the ends of her nervous system. No way to hide from the bombs of Chanel, Passion, and Beautiful. The temptation had been looming for what seemed like a millennium, nesting itself in her mind the way she nestled into a nourishing meal. It would have been inconceivable if not for her new, stronger legs that had danced readily across the surface toward the brilliant yawn in the darkness – had skittered dreadfully toward a future where she would finally know, positively, what was out there.

Before falling out of her world and into this new enterprise, others had shuffled past her in great lines that ended only at points east and west. Some carried food; others rushed off to the breeding grounds. She felt as if she stood at a juncture that stretched beyond their existence. She faced their swelling rows and the brilliant depth of the opening with her new assortment of body parts and wanted nothing more than to jump into the passing pull of bodies. She fought the inbred need to belong and clambered over them until she was on the other side of the eternal commotion that had, thus far, separated her from another reality.

Pausing to catch her breath, she moved herself in a semi-circle and faced the great juxtaposition of collective stability and cosmic uncertainty. She strode the millimeters to the great chasm in mere seconds, and stood on a precipice of blinding chaos. The movement, the sheer magnitude of the objects that moved beyond that portal, boggled her senses. Like heavenly bodies, they swung past in varying arrays of speed, color, sound, and scent. A strange symphony erupted from their cacophonous mutterings; the timber of their voices rollicked through her body. The variegated spray of pigments at once burned her eyes and opened her mind. What did it all mean? How could this have been just beyond their collective reality and not one of them had ever ventured out to acknowledge it, experience it, or attempt to understand it? Seeking the answers, she meandered her way beyond the edges of darkness and light, out onto the surface of a glass counter top.

After exploring only a few steps, an elegant leg, longer than any she had ever seen, wound itself around her midsection as if to pull her into an intimate dance. She turned and attempted to maneuver herself into a position that would allow her to communicate with the owner of such an impressive appendage. After all, where she had come from, the length of one's appendages were a mark of beauty and privilege. Upon turning to face it, she found that the leg was a gossamer thread, detached from body or host, that stretched ten times the length of her own stunted ambulatory means. Fascination gripped her as she moved the entire length of the disembodied leg. To what creature could this exquisite apparatus have once belonged?

As she considered pulling the leg back toward the crevice, for it was quite light,an opaque and solid darkness flew crushingly across the surface of the counter top, grazing her body, shoving her to the ground, and sweeping the unbelievable appendage over the edge of the horizon. Terror melted her as the object slung back across the counter, this time landing to her left only centimeters from where she crouched. Like a vast obelisk, this astoundingly large mass sat stationary, oblivious to the detriment it had placed upon her.

The crevice, mere inches from where she was immobilized, beckoned to her. She darted left, then zipped and zagged around the broken horizon of the counter top. Back, back from whence she came, the giant chasm in the reflective plane before her. To reach it, she would have to stealthily run along the gargantuan monstrosity and fling herself into the cavity, back to the safety of a world she knew. She darted to the side of the monument, rushing with tapping feet along its wall. The chasm was here; she stood on its edge, but could not jump. In her rush, the behemoth at her side had moved ever so slightly and trapped her hind appendage under its massive girth. No matter how she strained at her leg, she could not disengage it from under the weighty monster. A last moment of pressure, of pleasurable understanding, and pain ripped her as she pummeled into her world leaving her own appendage as a token.

Two if by Night

By A.E. Bayne

The bag was not large enough to hold all of her possessions, but she knew this before she started. That was not the point; rather, the point was for her to look fashionable while traveling on the train north to liaison with him. So, as she pulled the all too small bag out of the dusty closet, and after brushing a protuberance of cat hairballs off of its surface, she swung it through her bedroom, arcing it onto her rumpled bed.

This glossy red, faux alligator print bag had cost her nothing, a throw-away from a friend who’d obtained it through an offer from Estée Lauder at the mall; but she thought it looked fairly chic, as it was meant to look. The bag would have made a fine work satchel, perhaps a solid case for carrying papers to and from class, but it had neither the depth nor the breadth to hold all that she would need for this night’s visit.

She opened the bag, fingering the zipper, and then the polyester lining with pockets for cell phone and makeup. Into it, she deposited an extra pair of shoes, in case they decided to take a walk in Olde Towne that evening, as well as some touch-up nail polish for her toes. She would wear heels to meet him at the train station, but she didn’t think she’d be able to hold out if they strolled around town; however, the heels did make her legs look ten miles long, and the flats always gave her the sensation of being dwarfed by everyone around her. What the hell, she would have the flats in case the heels started to give her blisters. She could always stick them into her bag if they went out.

The plan was to stay in for dinner and a movie, so the shoes would probably come off at the door. Speaking of which, she would definitely need a suitable outfit for bumming around the apartment. This would be their first attempt at a weekend together, so she wanted to give it some thought. If she took something too revealing, he would think that she was looking for sex immediately; and while she would like to see the evening end that way, she would also like to be able to get through the film. So, maybe the yoga pants and the cute t-shirt. That was low-key and wouldn’t send the message, “jump my bones,” before the end of the film. She imagined herself snuggled up to him in her tee and spandex/cotton mix. Yes. Check. She threw it in the bag.

In also went the facial wash, the moisturizer, toothbrush, toothpaste (no, he probably had toothpaste), hair brush, hair clip, make-up bag packed with her “light” face, two pair of fresh underwear, contact lens solution, glasses, deodorant, perfume, an extra bra, and a pair of socks.

She figured that she could wear the same outfit coming home in the morning, but maybe she should pack a fresh top. On the way up, she would wear the loose, brightly embellished peasant top with the black walking shorts and black heels. Maybe she would switch to casual in the morning with a powder blue, fitted button-up tank and her abalone studded thong sandals. They would most likely hit a diner for breakfast.

Done! The bag was packed. Wait! She shoved her cell phone with its charger, camera and extra battery pack, a notebook in case she had a chance to write, and the novel from her bedside table into the sides and corners of the bag. Oh, and an extra pen. Could she fit her drawing tablet? No, no more room. She could carry it. No.
This was one night, she reprimanded herself. Was she over-thinking the packing? Probably, but this was new and rather exciting for her. She didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

The bag itself looked less like a sophisticated piece of travel wear and more like a stuffed sausage with a gaping wound on top. She struggled with the zippery lips, pulling them close to tight with her weaker left hand, while attempting to force the zipper along the teeth to close it with her right hand. Just, one, more, half, an, inch! There! The closed bag now resembled a misshapen sofa cushion, large bulges pushing out on either side. So rotund was the bag, that the handles barely allowed a finger hold when she grasped them together to pull it off the bed. Maybe she had over packed. Could her life really be so complicated that she needed a full-sized suitcase for an overnight visit? Why couldn’t she leave these things behind?

She pulled the bag down the hall, cursing and scuffing walls as she went. It gave her an unsightly gait. This was certainly not the urbane image she had hoped to display on the train to the city, nor when she exited the car and walked into his arms. She was envisioning Grace Kelly, but looked more like Quasimodo.

Dropping the bag by the door, she let out an audible, “phew.” Good golly, miss molly, she had no idea how she was going to get the bag to the station. She checked her watch. The cab would be here in ten minutes. She checked her reflection in the mirror by the door and swept the dewy sweat from her brow. Looking good.

Her phone vibrated against her hip, causing her to jump into the table.

“Hello?”

“Hi. It’s me,” he said.

“I just finished packing.”

“I hope you didn’t go to a lot of trouble. You won’t need much.”

“No, not any trouble, “ she crossed her fingers.

“I mean, it’s no big deal, right. Just dinner and a movie,” his voice trailed away.

“Sure,” she didn’t like his tone. “I’m excited about coming up though. This will be fun.”

“Yeah, but you know, we can just, hang,” he casually suggested.

“Um, okay.”

“I mean, we can go out and go shopping for food,” he picked up.

“Yeah, that’s what we said,” she edged.

“And then the movie.”

“Well, yeah.”

“It’s just, my back has been bothering me,” he began.

“Oh, what’s wrong, “ she asked quietly.

“Just the usual. It’s very sore,” he sighed.

“Oh, okay, I’m sorry. Maybe I can give you a back rub?”

“Maybe. It’s just, I can’t really do anything, you know.”

“Do you want to, “ she paused, breathed, gulped, “do this another time?”

“No! Well, no, not unless you do,” he back-pedaled.

“Oh, well, I’m okay with either way, “she said too fast.

“No, no, come on up…” he said half-heartedly.

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Come up. We’ll make dinner and watch the movie.”

“Okay, because I am packed. We don’t have to do anything.”

“Yeah. It’s just…” he stopped.

“Just?”

“It’s just, what are we doing here?”

The question. She thought for a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“What does all this mean? What are we doing?” he weakly elaborated.

“Getting together? Like we planned?” she said, dismayed.

“No, I mean, you know how I feel about us,” he said.

Oh, she knew. She sighed audibly.

“What are you trying to say?”

“I just think we should make it clear. What are we doing? Are we friends with benefits?”

He made it sound so tawdry. Really? Friends with benefits? After three years? Now she was getting angry.

“Well, I think we’ve been through a lot to call it that. Is that how you think of it?”

She hoped he could hear the frustration in her voice.

“No! I mean, I know you are not the type to want that kind of relationship,” he said pointedly.

“No, we’ve talked about that.”

“But that is what we’re doing, right? Because you know that I’m not into having a relationship right now.”

“So you’ve said,” she paused, hiccupping a tear. “I guess I just thought, after last time…” she trailed off, pausing to let the emotion sink back into the pit of her stomach.

“You thought what?”

“Well, with what we’ve been through recently, and then the way we were together the last time,” she offered and then stopped. “You know what? I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore. I feel very stupid.”

“No! What do you mean? You should not feel stupid,” he blurted.

“Well, yeah, I do. I feel like I misinterpreted what you meant last time, and it’s not the first time I’ve done that with you.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Silence.

“So, where do we go now,” he asked.

“I think we both need some distance at this point,” she said decidedly.

She looked at the bag, tipping over with its ridiculous weight, thinking about the farce she had allowed herself to believe.

She continued, “I don’t say that out of anger or malice, but life needs to move on for both of us. We’ve got too much baggage.”

“Oh, I understand if you don’t want to talk to me. I do,” he said, unconvinced. She knew he thought she would come around again in a few weeks, a month tops. It had been that way for three years.

“The fact that you can say that to me, and accept the fact that it will mean that we won’t have anything to do with one another, tells me that we don’t have any kind of relationship. It tells me more than you could have ever said directly. It tells me that we are over. Goodbye then.”

With tears finally searing a trail down her face, she hung up the phone and let it fall from her hand. It spun across the table and bounced off of the much abused glossy red bag.