What am I anymore? Some days I feel like a rock, other days I feel like a cloud full of rain. At times the heartbeat hurts, and I just want to go to space and be all alone. Then the clock chimes a certain time like a line in the sand, and all I want is to be turned up against her. I think she’s missing because I can’t find her anymore. I thought maybe I left her in the closet with the light turned on and a plate of food, but when I went to look, the light was off, and she wasn’t there. The plate was empty, though.
Maybe she took off to Florida like she always talked about. She wanted to live in Orlando so she could be near the dwarves. I never understood why I was never good enough for her. I suppose in the end it really doesn’t matter that much. She took off without me. Everyone takes off without me.
Somehow, I ended up on a jet plane headed west and I was wandering around the airport in Las Vegas. I had one suitcase. I got a cab and had the driver take me to The Cosmopolitan. I wanted to be up in the cosmos, the 37th floor, so I could soar to the stars and dive down into an infinity pool to find infinity.
The Goldilocks were all dressed in red and champagne and everyone was so good at making noise. Las Vegas is such a noisy place and that’s why they build the hotels so tall so the people who are afraid of the noise can find some solace up in the clouds, the flip threat atmosphere climb is always a good one.
I wandered around in Caesar’s Palace, but I never met the emperor. I bought beer after beer from a vending machine doctor. Mimes in white with pointy hats and red mouths smiled so strangely whenever I came near. I was surprised there were so many kids running around. I thought this was a playground for adults. Matters of life just don’t matter anymore.
I was lying in bed and looking out the big window at the sparkly darkness when someone came pounding on the door. My heart went psycho in my chest, and I had to clutch my own breast to make it settle. I put on one of the big white fluffy bathrobes they give you and went to the door. I noticed all the hair had fallen out of my legs, and now it was falling out of my chest and my arms, too. No one was there. It was all in my crazy head again.
I’m always falling in one way or another and I just don’t understand. I can’t keep up the pace that life demands of us. I just want to sit down for five fucking minutes. But the machine doesn’t let me. The machine always runs—29 hours a day, 13 days a week, 904 weeks a year. Time is all nonsense now, like purple wine in a gravity-free cathedral. Jesus and his sex dolls are just spinning aimlessly. Space is space and space is seemingly infinite but where exactly is this infinite space? Maybe it’s all in my head.
I stepped out onto the veranda and watched the city glow and explode and ignite and withdraw and scream and cry and finally never say goodbye. I saw a helicopter float atop the dome-like glow of the city. I watched it land on top of a building. It was a high square building with a gigantic H on it. H for hospital. H for hang in there. H for hallelujah. H for help.
I walked into the gilded sterile box and climbed aboard an elevator for the ninth floor. It released me onto a shimmering corridor with countless doors. I walked along and looked in the rooms there. I saw sad people, I saw lonely people, I saw people visiting with loved ones and they were only now just loved ones because death was near. I found a room that was empty, and I climbed up into the bed. I played with the controls. I switched on the TV. I waited for a visitor, but no one ever came. Before I fell asleep, I thought about what might happen to me the next day. It’s all I had because everything else was void and gone. I finally closed my eyes and went to space. There I found her on one of Saturn’s 145 moons. She was beautiful, beyond beyond.
Liberty lies in the wake of a blue house ghost. Christmas glass shines like ass. A ruby red orb like a planet at dusk, in the dust of the Old West. Cowboys cling to the hard backs of horses, sunsets spill, tequila dreams drop like rockets from the moon into the sea. We see. Martians of nuclear clouds. We see. Buildings blowing like bubbles on days of infamy.
Felipe Flauta drags a 39-gallon gray plastic trash can from the kitchen to the back alleyway. It’s full of food waste and he cries as he turns it up and over the lip of the Dumpster. The lip of the Dumpster.
He recalls the clothing store chick in the mall who laughed at him when he brought her a rose and fast-food Mexican from the food court. “I wrote you a love poem,” he told her. He pulled the crinkled notebook paper from his pocket and handed it to her.
Her name was Glenda. Glenda? Was she a good witch? She was embarrassed as she took it. “I’m at work. I’ll read it later.”
“Would you like to eat food with me?” Felipe asked. He brushed the dark hair from his eyes with his fingers. “Do you like burritos?”
That made Glenda laugh as she stood behind the counter. “No. I hate burritos.” She had tossed up blonde hair and she wagged it behind her with a shake of her head. She was overly perfumed. “Don’t you know I’m out of your league? Because I am.”
“You don’t have to be so cruel,” Felipe said. He was meek. He was humble. He was shy. He was small. “I was just trying to be nice. I like you.”
“But I don’t like you. You are pursuing something that is bound to crush you. I really have to get back to work now.”
She walked away from the counter to help a dingy customer with some crappy, overpriced clothes. Felipe sighed. He held the bag of Mexican food tighter in his hand. He went back out to the food court and found a lonely table away from everyone else. He sat down and pulled a burrito out of the bag. He released it from the warm paper. It looked delicious, but he suddenly wasn’t hungry.
He sat stone still and thought of how Glenda had hurt his small heart. Small heart? Then he cried out. “My heart is large and full of foolish love!” People in the food court turned to look. Some pointed and laughed.
Felipe stood up. He reached down and took the burrito into his hand and walked back to the clothing store where Glenda worked. He marched straight to the counter where she was now leaning over and flipping through a dirty magazine. “Hey!” Felipe yelled.
Glenda looked up. She made a face. “You again? What do you want now?”
“It’s feeding time for all the animals,” Felipe said, and he threw the burrito at her face as hard as he could.
She made an ohhhughhh sound of some sort and it forced her face to contort and shift. The burrito burst open, and its contents covered her heavily made-up face. She screamed as she pawed away the mess. “What the hell!”
Felipe grinned because he knew he had done well in the art of revenge, trickery, whatever it was. “I’m not a fan of food waste. I had to use that burrito for something. Have a nice day.” He walked out as she wept.
Felipe Flauta leaned against a wall in the alleyway and smoked a Spanish cigarette. He was wearing a soiled white apron. The kitchen at Thunder Taco was a hard, messy place to work. He smelled of food and sweat. He always seemed to smell like food and sweat. Food and sweat or dirty dishwasher. He did all the dirty jobs. He figured that was because he was meek and shy and lonely and unsure and wasn’t always able to speak up for himself.
Felipe lived with his Aunt Grasella in a stucco hacienda on the wrong side of the tracks on the wrong side of the city. His parents had died in a hot air balloon crash over the Grand Canyon. His siblings were all older and had moved on. Felipe had a small bedroom with one window that looked out on an alley. His bed was made for one. His existence was so completely singular. He had a stereo and liked to listen to old Rush albums. He would sometimes smoke marijuana and exhale the smoke into his pillow so his aunt wouldn’t smell it. One day she did and she got angry and made him get a job. And that’s why he was a dishwasher at Thunder Taco.
Someone called his name from the kitchen. “Felipe!” He tossed his smoke to the ground and went back inside. A cook by the name of Bryan told him there was someone out front who wanted to see him. Bryan was pretty much an asshole, Felipe thought. He never let him bum smokes. He was saltier than soy sauce. “Who is it?” Felipe wanted to know.
“I don’t know… But she’s a fox.”
Felipe wasn’t familiar with the term. “A fox?”
“She’s hot. She’s got a great body.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, man. Get out there before she takes off… Hey wait, come here,” Bryan said to him. “Let me give you a little advice. Chicks like her dig a guy who sweet talks them. You know, poetry and junk like that.”
“But I’m not a poet. I’m just a dishwasher.”
“Anybody can be a poet, man. Tell you what. I’ve got a line you can lay on her that is guaranteed to get you some action.”
“Action?” Felipe wondered.
“Dude. I’m talking about the ol’ in-out, in-out.” Bryan the asshole cook took his right pointer finger and inserted it into a hole created by his left pointer finger and thumb. He imitated the action of intercourse and grinned.
Felipe was puzzled.
“Sex, man! Sex! I’m talking about man on woman WrestleMania, dude. What’s your problem? Are you afraid of girls or something? Geez.”
Felipe looked down to the ground. He didn’t like the way Bryan the asshole cook talked. Someone put in an order at the window. Bryan looked at him and just shook his head. “I’ll keep the line to myself. I got to get back to work, but take some sort of action, man. Or you will always be just a dishwasher.”
Felipe washed his hands and looked at himself in a clouded mirror above a sink. He took a deep breath and walked out to the front of the restaurant. Glenda from the clothing store at the mall was sitting at a table by the window and looking out at the world. He walked over to her. She turned to look at him. “Hey,” she said.
Felipe sat down across from her. “What are you doing here? I didn’t think you liked Mexican food.”
“I’m not here for the food.” She licked at her Disney Channel mouth and acted nervous. “I came to see you.”
“Me? Why? I thought you hated me.”
“Hate is such an ugly word.”
“What is going on with you?” Felipe wanted to know. He was feeling distrust. “Do you have emotional problems?”
“No… I’m sorry I made fun of you,” she said. “I act like that when I’m nervous. I know it’s terrible, but I can’t help it. I always regret it after.”
Felipe looked around as if there might be someone else behind the scenes pulling her strings. He thought it was all an act. “Are you a puppet?” he asked her. “Puppets creep me out.”
“A puppet? No, I’m not a puppet. What a strange thing to say.”
“Is that all you want?”
“Don’t you have something to say to me?”
Felipe leaned back and strummed his fingers against the window. “No. What would I have to say to you?”
“You threw a burrito in my face. It was mortifying. I was hoping you’d at least apologize, and we could move on from this. Maybe be friends.”
Felipe looked up and toward the kitchen. Bryan was hovering in the shadows and watching them. He was doing his ol’ in-out, in-out routine with his fingers again. Felipe cleared his throat. “Do you want to have sex with me?”
Glenda’s sweet-as-rhubarb-pie face morphed into a sour snarl. “What!?”
Felipe leaned forward and put his elbows on the table and looked right into her eyes. “I asked you if you wanted to have sex with me.”
Glenda fumed. “Are you being serious right now?”
“Yes. What’s the problem? Geez.” He looked across the restaurant at Bryan who was shaking his head in the positive and grinning triumphantly.
“Do you know anything!? Have you any clue what romance is? What love is?”
Felipe was more than surprised by her words. “Love?”
Glenda began to cry. “You don’t throw a burrito at someone who loves you.”
“What?”
Glenda suddenly stood up. “I love you, Felipe! I’ve loved you since tenth grade.” She covered her face with her hands and cried harder.
Felipe jumped up in shock. “This is hot and fresh and a jiggled mystery to me.”
She pulled her hands away from her face and looked at him. “You’re a senseless fool, Felipe Flauta. A god damn senseless fool.” Glenda dashed from the love ruins of Thunder Taco. She paused outside on the other side of the window and looked through at him one last time before running away.
Felipe slumped back down in his seat at the table and withdrew into his deeper self. Bryan the asshole cook sauntered over. He slapped a white towel over his shoulder and clamped a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “That was rough, man,” he said. “Real rough.”
“She could have been my person,” Felipe said softly. “The one person who could love me forever… And I threw a burrito at her.”
Bryan took the seat across from him, folded his arms, and sighed. “And you straight up asked her to have sex. Damn, man. That takes guts.”
“And what good did it do me? She ran straight out of my life.”
“Do you love her?”
Felipe was shocked that Bryan the asshole cook would even utter those words. “I think so.”
“Then go after her. Go find out for sure.” Bryan got up and started to walk away.
“But I’ve got a pile of dishes back there that need attention,” Felipe called out after him.
The words floated across the waves of dying light as the whole of reality stood still. “Fuck the dishes… Love is everything and more now.”
Felipe looked around at his present-tense broken future. He got up and went to the door. He pushed it open and stepped out. The breath of Los Angeles struck his face, and he went into it and after her, his royal soul on indelible fire.
END
By
Aaron Echoes August
Check out the latest post at my companion site, Blowtorch Pastoral: The Baker.
Photo by Douglas Henrique Marin dos Santos on Pexels.com
A misty green jungle glow leaves me melancholy high at mid-morning sigh the curtains in the kitchen hold back the ashen stare of this cell block with eighty tiny windows and hands reaching out to pray for the immoral justice to fade, fade with the orange gassy glow of another wet night of multiple ampersand weddings and lonely shuffles beneath creaking porch lights … and I cannot stop thinking of the wandering crows in those tiny black clothes and how they blow through the air and into a fractured face when the hobbling world is overworked or tired as I light these mystic candles all alone the mantle missing pictures of all the seas of you and I at the shores of blue water space and it’s blessed to imagine the days we are tightly knit together our lives wrapped around each other like newspaper on fish, like wings on wheels and it’s fun to play life with you for without you this game is already over and I am merely a wedge stuck beneath an open door letting all the air out forever and ever.
I went to the place of high sands, the place of paper wasps swarming around my heart looking to sting, to puncture another hole in my already bruised organ. I walked among the hibernating cottonwoods and the mulberry bush lapped by the setting sun I saw a great owl rise quick from his post and the noise and speed startled me, really startled me like a pan noisily collapsing atop its pile in the cold kitchen of my romance novel abode gone sour every niche cold and silent every breath weeps lonely and I cry out for childhood again, dumbfounded and swimming in the hopes most likely false and it kills me inside wants to make me kill it all around tired of this everlasting ache constantly welling up, then subsiding welling up again, never subsiding as I try to ignore the complications of human existence as that bird outside my window takes a kamikaze dive into the crooked steeple the church bells toll toll through my soul golden gongs of everlasting love echoing of destiny derailed and the sands of time don’t spill quick enough it’s already all flubbered and flucked and I want to get off, get off, get off.
The days here now are cold and polished the gray sky like some sheet of ice dangling from the ceiling clouds like membranes all pulled apart everyone flying south and I just want to go north or east to feel her breasts press against my chest as she goes down on me in 4 a.m. lust, the sands of time, the sands so smooth and arched trickle down with gravity filling in all the spaces that I’ve stepped in before erasing me, erasing me from the palette all color blank and void the purity of her pronounced speech fading to a cold, silver shimmer sand and shotguns blasting me all away to another day where my memories do not thrive and poke where my past no longer plays magistrate eternally swallowing the key if I knew not love I could triumph in life’s wars not knowing love I would be without a soul where do I go without a soul I do not know.
When life has ended at the midpoint but you are still waking up, still breathing, what memento have you become? what cherished scrapbook do you yellow within what guts are you released from ever so violently wicked violets leaving purple bruises on the hands, on the cold glass of winter dusk, on eyelids heavy with sleep, on dreams inked by the utterances of self-depravity, lost in all the spaces melting together that crush crush me, crush me, crush me with charity and the goodwill of electric casual sex.
I am the canvas stretched and splattered, splattered with the annoyances of modern artists of cave dwellers bar dwellers bedroom noise dwellers and the sinking feeling you get when you break a bone and you are all alone and starve helplessly gnawing on carpet fibers in your very own home but no one is really home the doorbell is disconnected the knock is dissected the blessings never resurrected like Christ tied to a goal post and everyone kicking the shit out of Him just because He is who He is.
Everyone gasps at his philosophy he is such an atrocity how can he be allowed to live mumble the Pee and Em as they read from the good book and hate and kill just the same behind turned heads and silver tears candy is the only one left on Earth to me and even sugar is drifting away sometimes it seems though not entirely elegantly true throw me another bruise God wipe my face across the broken glass once more kick me breathless beat me senseless stuff me back into the womb and cut me away why won’t you save me for another day?
And everyone walks on eventually can’t stand the sight of me so what is my reason today to breathe, to walk, to slide away? To put on shoes or arise from slumber I’ll only be smacked around with a piece of jagged lumber, a beer spill down the shirt is cold and I want to be washed away to a bar in Denver hyped up and comatose with a drink in my hand and a smoke plastered between my fingers talking to the broken bodies of bones who pass by me like nuptial ghosts and I never rode a hotel bicycle in a wedding dress phoning cock-throbbing villains fleeing the scene like sand carving away another piece of forgotten history, tucking it neatly in a pirate bottle of glass.
I awake to the finale soundings of a dream, pears crystallized by heaven’s lamp of heat and love, the disco spills out onto the street at 4 a.m., stars bungled and bundles above. I lie like a body floating in the bed. I talk to the ceiling, I chat with the windows, I argue with the red walls, I yell at the floor. Scuffling forth toward the day of wood, coffee brews, madmen stew, angels on pyres burn, rainbow wings like volcano ashes, the swimming clouds, the broken bones, the mad shopping frenzy on Holiday eves, the eaves of the neighborhood roofs tinted with a white glaze of frost, Christmas trees chopped and bundled, presents dissected beneath its branches, love a mystery, missing, a flowing and wanting ache at times, other times a wishful hope, a tender kiss, her eyes like blue waterfalls, her warmth beside me, love is more than anything one could ever know, the penultimate leaping circus, the penultimate cherished touch, the penultimate heartbeat.
Some days I think all is lost. Some days the future of life seems slightly bright, like a torchlight in darkness, and those times when I look ahead at a world without me, I wonder where I will be, where will I float endlessly, what colors of the sky will I see, that is, if there will even be a sky. The hum of existence rides like trains on rails, the gentle rock, the hypnotic sway through a countryside of rolling green and small villages, mountains and curving streams, lapis lazuli skies above Nepal, the long valleys of green and ice and towering mountains. That day I found a plastic bag of money outside Kathmandu. It was all foreign to me and I didn’t know how to speak. I ended up in a restaurant and had ravioli and wine. People were laughing, people were covered in ice and bruises. They talked about that earthquake that changed their very existence, changed the landscape, buried souls and dreams and buildings. Everything in life seems lie an aftershock at times.
I wanted to go home. I wanted to fly in a plane and look out the window. The clouds below me instead of always above me. To float on a funeral carpet of magic, to feel altitude changes in my guts, to eat peanuts and choke because my 7-Up was drained. A snoring idiot across the aisle. I couldn’t understand why she was content in missing the blessings of sight and feeling. Where do I float to now? Most of the time I don’t know. Maybe I never know. My guts are restless. These aged guts twisted in agony and contentment at the same furrowed gravity time space. Would it be easier to just be medieval? It’s never been easy. This road we walk upon, these bricks are not always golden.
I looked down out of the plane now. It was finally dark. The planets and the stars were up there in our way. The smear of melancholy lights below atop the Earth, pinpricks of existence, of life, of movement, of pain, shame, being insane. The zoo candles flickering among the fur and cages. The animals howling for freedom and food. They just want to be loved like all the other living things. Love fills the distance between hope and fear. Her blue eyes cast wishes I cannot always fulfill, but they also cast a love I never knew.
Independent content creator, author, former print and digital journalist, and trying really hard to be a diligent husband. I am the publisher and editor of Cereal After Sex, an eccentric online journal/magazine focused on social commentary and fiction with an unpredictable edge. I reside in Tennessee, US.
We lay on cold sheets in a storm the lightning bursts are like flash bulbs as I stare out the slots of the shades smelling you in between and watching you dream as the fan whirls clockwise and every grain of sand swoops by for inspection a new direction in this carnival this carnage of the heart struggling to remain grease-free in the compounds of life that line every lonely street beautiful facades of dirty brick and brown the white hotel curtains spill out of a window a siren weeps in the distance as cold, gray clouds make their way to shore and the carnival rides are suspended in time swinging metal gates of green and yellow swaying cages testing the cold as another leaf drops from God’s eye and the colors all smell like warmed rum and roses fireplace smoke belching from quiet homes a quilt of steamships weaved across massive fields of straw and grass and rocks that roar quiet canyons shored by sandstone begging copulation with legs and arms and sweat screaming at clouds from upon your own private mesa dancing with the bottle of brandy through the wind miles of life stretched out before me dug into the crooked hill swamped with begging trees and moss another furlough to the perimeter looking for a crisp bed beneath a deer’s stranded leg playing Santa Claus to the wishes in his head.
The pain all around wells up like a giant moth expediting delivery of the empty kiss from a stone or a lamp post and in the mad sad he wishes to be delivered to a wet execution complete with knives and deep cuts into the core to exonerate the pain of his past to let them fly like black ghosts searching for an engine to blast them away forever into a bank account that does not exist.
Thus, it breathes regret and guilt for the moments that died the moments that killed the moments that were like flowers the moments that were like caged isolation and cold, yellow cement the pity of all that bled in the pinprick hole that is vision and drumbeats of medicine pounding through the skull a licorice taste all nonsense and dry fuming incense sticks covering the stale scent of loneliness in the bric-a-brac dogma of life in the glossy television screen so does he say “good night?” or does he say “goodnight?” the space in between can make all the difference between a connection or a haunted breath.
It was an autumnal Sunday full of color, her favorite being the peachy orange as it stood out as the brightest and boldest among the others. I glanced over at the woman in the passenger seat and my heart jumped and my stomach made a longing roll within itself. I knew I was in love and would be forever with this one. I was living in sort of a dreamland at that moment.
We had just come from sculpting our bodies and filling the auto with petrol. We were in the mood for a good coffee and some brunch. And since Halloween was edging closer by the day, we decided to go to one of our favorite haunts, that place downtown where the mists of our ghostly memories cling to the air like cream on pumpkin pie. The Coffeehouse.
The Coffeehouse sat on a popular corner in the downtown sector of our town and was one of the few places open on Sunday seeing that many of the townsfolk flocked to the booming bell towers to chant and sing to great stained-glass Bog in the sky, their voices like bleached licorice streams frothing and flowing forth from their hypocritical holy gullets and spilling out into the world like sirens in the sky.
Parking came easy, which it never did during the week, and we walked hand in hand down the crisp concrete, staggering behind some old lady in a red coat puffing away on a white cigarette. We caught a whiff of the cloud she spoke of, and memories of wild younger days danced in my head as my lady friend battened down the sweet hatches of her body – for she has battles between the air and her own lungs.
We entered the establishment and there was a small crowd inside quietly murmuring among themselves and we made our way to the front counter and to where they had the large rectangular menu board set off to one side. Our eyes strolled along the boardwalk of selections and my lady friend went straight for the London Fog, some kind of tea mash up that I don’t really clearly understand, but it gives her great joy as it slips across her lips and down into her glorious guts.
I usually would opt for a Cuban coffee, but on this autumnal Sunday inside The Coffeehouse, I wanted to try something different and went for the elderberry tea because I wanted a jolt of something that would rev up my immune system or whatever the hell it does. I also wanted the waffle with whipped cream and sliced banana. My lady went with the waffle as well, but with fresh berries and whipped cream. I was feeling a bit randy after all that talk of whipped cream, and I pulled her close to me and whispered something about uncontrollable hot love and madness.
The clerkie at the counter was a confused, nervous type – probably a newbie that wouldn’t last – and she kept asking the barista beside her questions about this and questions about that, and then as she was clumsily punching our order into the machine there, she would look up at us with a pained expression and tell us, “We’re out of that, we’re out of that, too. We don’t have that. I’m sorry we don’t have any of that either.” They had a piece of paper there with a list of things they were out of that the girl kept referring to. It was a long list. My lady friend wanted to look at it, but they kept it guarded like some great royal secret.
They didn’t have either of the teas needed for our chosen beverages. They didn’t have what they needed for our backups, as well. I wondered if they even had water. With frustrations growing, my lady and I settled on Plan C – drinks we didn’t really want because it was all that remained. The sadness in her eyes made me want to smash a spooky pumpkin right then and there, but then again, I would have probably been busted up myself by the bobbies for causing a radical disturbance on the Day of the Lord.
Grief-stricken by the news of the Coffeehouse’s diminished supply, we took our number to a small table for two and sat down. A short while later, the same girl who had taken our order at the counter strolled over, a haunted house type of fear smeared across her face, and she informed us, “I’m sorry, we’re out of waffles… But we have pancakes.”
My lady friend, who is often much bolder than I, quickly snapped back with, “This is ridiculous. How can you have pancakes, but not waffles? Can we just get a refund.”
My nerves were tingling throughout my body as we made our way back up to the counter to engage in whatever process would be necessary to get our refund. I wasn’t looking forward to it because I figured it would be some horribly complicated thing that they couldn’t figure out and it would take half the day. But then, the humbled and meek clerkie girl came through the crowd with a palmful of cash and some coin. She handed it to me and apologized again. After that, we walked out.
I took my lady by the hand, and we strolled along the walk, my insides grumbling with anger. My lady friend, however, is quick to resolve disappointment in life by looking at the brighter side of… Everything. She has a gift for staying positive in an increasingly negative world. I was ready to smash things, and she was more than willing to just move on to a greater destination and not let our let down weigh us down. She’s angelic like that, and I often believe that is the reason the universe gifted her to me. She’s always what I need when I need it. She always has been – from the very beginning of us to the very breath I take now. I only hope I can return that gift tenfold.
We crossed over the street to the other side and found a little patio bar type kind of place we had never been to and were happy to see they were still serving brunch. We sat outside and we had the sugar waffles with syrup, fruit, and bacon. We were tucked up against each other on a bench at a metal table as we ate and drank. The weather was perfect. The sky was a pure, unmuddied blue. The air was kindly littered with gold and green and orange. And in the end, things turned out better than I expected. We were in a passing moment of life, and we were in it together, and that’s perfect imperfection.
By
Aaron Echoes August
An online journal of fiction, essays, and social commentary.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 