Because if she still loves you on a Tuesday in the rain

This is a first draft, and more an experiment (for me) with a narrative perspective than an effective piece. If you've got a minute, I'd love to hear what you think. If you're pressed for time, treat yourself a bit - scroll down and read about Zev.

Bill didn't know what had made him so irritable that afternoon. He hadn't meant to say all those things to the bus driver, because he was sure the poor craggy man's mother was a perfectly nice woman, and quite chaste, and quite dead. In fact, he doubted, unless she was quite an athlete, that she could even execute the acrobatic feats he had attributed to her.

A honking car jolted him out of a crosswalk. His wandering mind had carried him all the way down the Oak Street hill, far past Jenny's Consignment Shop and its pruning merchandise and its almost anachronistically curvaceous cashier. He couldn't really go back unless he had a mind to buy something, and even rummaging through the mothball-drenched store made his stomach turn. The cashier was 60, he was sure, and it was just the reek of preservatives that kept her looking collegiate and taut. Still, he got goosebumps whenever she smiled at him. He tried to make a point of peeking in each day, and giving a shout of hello in fair weather when the door was propped open. Except some days he blundered past and he was ruined for a whole 24.

“Hello, Bill.”

Bill's mind had a habit of going a different way than his feet, and while he nurtured the image of the cashier's red lips, his feet had carried him into the doughnut shop. Where Debbie worked.

“What can I get for you today, Bill?” Debbie the doughnut girl asked.

Bill thought of the horrible coincidence that to get at something so sweet, he had to penetrate something so sour. He recoiled at the word, “penetrate,” fearing something Freudian, and it must have shown in his face, because Debbie inquired,

“Is everything alright today, Bill?”

And she didn't use the insipid tone that Customer Service Training manuals advocate. She was asking after his health and state of mind. Like she could somehow comprehend, or even assuage the problems that afflicted him. Bill found it repulsive, but then he had been irritable all day, and again, it wasn't like the time she asked him whether he wanted a little extra sugar, and seemed to put a wink on it. It wasn't nearly like the time she asked if he would share his table during her coffee break, with the sly innuendo of a burgeoning advance. That had required a full vocal response – almost a sentence. This could be taken care of with a grunt.

“Un-hunh”

“So what kind of doughnut today, Bill?”

It was a trap. He wanted the manager's special. He always wanted the special, because he always appreciated variety, but this was her way of getting him to say it to her. To say special. To open his mouth and say,

“If I cared as much about my choice of doughnut as you care about your face, I'd probably be eating the puss-filled crater-to-be on your nose, but because I have a powdered-sugar's granule of self-respect, I think I'll go for the goddamn manager's choice. And when you give me the medium coffee, I'd appreciate if you could just give me the sweetener packets to handle myself – I don't want any sweet things slipping accidentally into my coffee.”

When he added it up, he was probably irritable because of the persistent cough from the two-week cold, the two cars that splashed him while he went trudging towards the bus (one ruining his white shirt) and the fact that after a month and a half without a date, the only woman that gave him the time of day was a pimple-faced, lard-loaded doughnut girl he dumped in the 10^th grade. John was happy that his hands could work independently of his mind, for they had already laid four dollar bills on the counter and waved a “keep the change” in the kind of man-in-charge way he wished his squeaky speaking voice could meet. Those confident hands reached up and pulled his flat-brimmed Yankees cap over his eyebrows while his feet plodded over to skulk arrogantly by the pick up counter. He appreciated the shelter from the stares of the other customers and the strident stern gaze of doughnut Debbie as she placed a napkin, and two Equals into his bag beside the chocolate glaze on his special pastry. He tried to fight off the creeping thought that his disgust may have been misplaced; he cocked his own shoulders to ward off the sting to his pride, but then, she said it.

“Have a good evening, Billy.”

The bitch was crazy for him. It didn't matter what he did - this was inviolable ga-ga. And in front of the droop-jawed clientele, he orchestrated all his limbs in a cool, smooth strut.

***

When the Pennsauken Police Department arrived at the dock, the anxious water taxi driver was already attesting his innocence, shouting in broken English about how the body had just washed up against his boat as he was getting ready for the first morning cross to Philadelphia, and nobody wanted to deal with the Camden police about a body. The surly detective was far more interested in the perfectly penned note pinned in the bull’s-eye center of the forehead, the old-fashioned ink uncannily preserved.

The art of drowning

The analogy with captivation makes it seem

voluntary, as if while the lungs are

bursting with emptiness, the mind considers a bit of coral

or a rock formation

to be more persuasive than life

But life is long you say

the analogy works the other way - we

cannot help our drowning

of course, many people think like you

and their bloated bodies surface daily.