Just before midnight, the automatic sprinklers cut off and left the lawn well satisfied, but drying towards another long summer day, and dreading the thirst of the afternoon. He sat in his office on the second floor, and marveled at how much noise the world still made despite her absence. Even without her movements, her breathing, the light clink and jangle of her jewelry, there was still the clock, the fan, the refrigerator down the hall. But despite the coolness left by the sprinklers, the weak breath of traffic farther off, and the bored half moon, he couldn’t seriously call any of it life.
He was inspired to do nothing but sit there, turning a pen over and over in his hand, waiting for an understanding to arrive unbidden and irrelevant. After all, it wasn’t his fault that she was gone. And beyond that, what was the help of it? No calling her back, no following after. There are acts without antidote, words unforgivable. No way in all the weeping world for a bell to be unrung.
He got up to make himself a drink, to ease the edge, to make the damp night bearable. Cuervo Gold. Wasn’t there a song? Then sat at the desk and sifted through photos of her face. Bright and elegant, with dark eyes and an easy grace that made men look twice and women stop dead, just to watch her sit and look around. She was never in a room but at the center of it.
Tequila never solved anything but maybe the torment of consciousness, and that’s rarely worth the price or the cost. So after a shot or two warmed his reins and the fog began to gather and descend, he went out. Down the stairs and into the yard, where he held his hands palm up and lifted his face to feel the sickly sky hanging like a slow intravenous drip. The grass was dark and dreaming, overjoyed.
There were crickets under the hedge and frogs in the ditch along the road. Beyond the troubled whispers of the house, everybody had good news. If only procreation in the damp, untroubled brush. They ignored him, as did the neighbors and their dogs, all dozing in front of TV sets, which cast a blue glow on all their window shades.
There was no anger in her leaving, don’t you see? Just a soft and pallid August afternoon, and the prospect of a night unbearable in the long sequence of nights that passed between them with this culmination in mysterious pain. So she left. And he was out walking, well beyond the farthest light of home, ruining his shoes in the cold and predictable rain.
© 2005 by Kyle Kimberlin
all rights reserved
2nd Draft, August 16, 2005
Metaphor 