Tag: romance
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Pillow Talk
You cannot escape truth when talking across a pillow. Delirious comfort leaves no space for fear. If there was a banking system for time, an exchange rate for moments, for getting back what we’ve lost, I would invest all these empty hours I bleed out introspectively on the page for one morning spent volleying whispered…
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Talking in My REM Sleep
In another life and with another brain I would have made myself pupil and master of language. Instead: I tiptoe on the precipices of residual memories that spill out from suppressed synapses. I desire nothing but the nine-minute intervals between hushing the waking bells I’ve fooled my mind the night before into believing will penetrate…
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Landlines: One Reason the ’90s Were the Best Decade for Elementary School Romance
Chivalrous courtship, (in the elementary-school-aged-male sense of the word) isn’t dead, but it took a major hit during the latter half of the first decade of this millennium. It started when households began doing away with their home phones and choosing to exclusively use cellular phones. With that one decision, the family itself lost a…
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Gas Money, Honey
Eastern Pennsylvanians love their hoagies. I’d pulled into a gas station after driving six hours north. The place advertised 2 for 1 liters of cola and state minimum cigarette prices. A ‘70s style goose sweeping across a setting sun illuminated above their door. Mosquitoes flocked to its luminance. I parked the car in the rear…
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Planes of You
Most of us do not remember the first time we learned our shapes. Until you budded into my life, I thought that I knew all the circles, squares, and rectangles – the rigidly defined personalities, those with a set number of sides, those who are predictable, parallel, familiar. I look back on the cast of…
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Headache (Killing Trevor Pt. 1)
The rain pounded on the metal roof of the car. It smattered against the glass. Filtered by those creeping droplets on the windows, the streetlight shadows animated the surfaces of the couple’s still faces. Cynthia, her thinly plucked eyebrows raised, looked at his hands as they gripped the steering wheel. A nervous tick of his,…
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Top Score
Whenever I would get to see you, when it was our time, I felt I was stepping up to the challenge of an arcade pinball machine. Feeling below the cabinet for that hidden power switch, I’d seek you out. Reaching into my coat pocket for my busted burner phone and punching in the sequence of…
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Conviction
I fell in love with a girl named Conviction. We are inseparable. When I walk, I walk with Conviction. When I speak, I speak with Conviction. Before her I was faithless, with her I believe.
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Temperance of Permanence
She met him when neither of them could stand to be alone. They remedied this by getting together. Now they’re face to face and he’s trying to tell her how now he can’t seem to be with anyone. The tightrope walk between being available and being alone is an act he’s made his own. Acrobats…
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Middleton
Middle age endows its members with, amongst strands of grey, bushels of gifts. Most are neglected, others embraced, but none must go unnoticed. Years accumulate, begging the excavation of long-buried relics—memories tucked under blankets of time. Unlike meticulously dusted deposits of Jurassic carbon, the artifacts of days past have a tendency to uproot hurriedly from…
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Purporting Romance Mythically
Romance is an exercise in myth building. When a new relationship is on the rise, budding rosebuds are gathered while the wilted are buried away. We pull together moments and save artifacts and write a history for our lives as newly paired duos. We destroy, to an extent, our former lives. We become revisionist historians,…
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Washed Away with the Floodwater
The old man adopted Kiddo in April at the suggestion of his eldest granddaughter. She told him a puppy would be good for him, what with a year of living alone under his belt. When she first offered the idea, just a short time after Julia went to the Lord and the walls of the…
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Softly-Filtered Wool Sweaters
The drives seemed to be endless, those he took with his father. An endless motor hum, and endless drone of rubber on the highway, an endless silence choking the air between driver and passenger. The silence was unbearable. Paul always wondered what was going through the older man’s mind as he sat silent behind the…
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Knee-high by the Fourth of July
On the opposite side of the road passed the third pickup he’d seen that afternoon donning an oversized American flag waving in the blackened air behind the cab’s smokestack exhaust pipes. Patriotism, he thought as stomach acid warmed his chest, muddied and misled. The giant flag, strung from a 4’’X4’’ wooden post, flapped in animated…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 