Prose

“I’m coming over in an hour,” Gerard leaves another message. “The casserole smells great. Made a coconut cream pie as well, and hid some Ghirardelli squares in it too, the way you like it. Hey, maybe we should stay in this year and chill, y’know, hang out a bit? Looks like it’s about to pour outside. What say we watch a century go by from your living room?” His voice sounds soothing, like a flannel throw over my shoulders and back, falling past my waist.
 
Hanging on the bedpost is his pullover from the day he wrapped it around my neck and called it cashmere and a shawl. On the floor is a shoebox of his family photographs that he left behind because he didn’t want it in his apartment. And on the left of that, his diary from when he was in his teens into his twenties, only a few of its pages filled as if all the years in between had been hollow to him. The mirror ball he staple-gunned to the ceiling is still there, suspended above me.
 
Insert line: “blue is this little I know of you and how much blue is filled”. Break.
 
Insert ghost note to round off the image: “the fuller sense still”
 
I turn to the player to put on an audio reading of Daniel Deronda or Middlemarch, pausing, unable to decide. What choice in the matter of chance and destiny, the realism of the roulette, its fixed point of rotation, and ever turning?
 
The radio begins to play Oleta Adams’ “My Heart Won’t Lie”, her voice like warm butter. I should turn up the volume, but this is all right, this moment will do, will seat itself like a barely audible whisper. A soft pause. Like that pensato waiting in the wings.

 
* This piece first appeared in the literary journal, "Fwriction".