A Strange Circumstance

He takes big swallows of hot coffee that she has made for him, opens his throat wide, his knobby Adam’s Apple barely moving. The hot liquid does not seem to bother him so much, nor the fact that he drools as much of the liquid onto the floorboards as makes it down his throat. The cut to his mouth has caused this, and although she has helped to suppress the bleeding, he still has not much use out of the mouth’s left corner.

It is night - a great, big dark night with a piss-yellow moon hanging in the sky and not much in the way of stars that he can see. He is on a porch that is not his, but that of the woman sitting next to him, a woman he met two days ago and has not said more than fifteen words to since she let him stay with her upon seeing his sad and broken face.

And he knows he should probably say more to her, make her feel that he appreciates her generosity and kindness for making him a couple of meals and letting him use her shower, although he has not taken her up on that just yet. He is not much for talking, though, and so he just sits with her and lets the night wash over them.

It has been a couple of days and the really sad thing, the most horrible thing about this all, is that he really wishes he could go back and do things over. Not that it would do any good. Wishing to do things over requires that people wish to do things differently and he just could not see that happening. She would still piss him off and he would still feel like killing her, and that was where any difference would end. Right there with the whole killing part and he tells himself that he would not do it this time, would not plunge the knife into her heart and watch her sink to the ground and watch her look up at him with pleading eyes for the first time ever, and he tells himself that he would not be thinking it is a little too late for that honey. That’s all I ever wanted from you was to look at me with eyes that were pleading - soft, sensitive eyes that do not lie and cheat and steal a man’s soul from the depths of his being. No, things would be different were he given the chance to do it all over again. He just didn’t know how and he was smart enough to know that this second chance would not come to pass. There just are no second chances for men like him.

He looks at the woman sitting next to him and wonders what her name is, if she has any children or a drunk-ass husband who would come home any day now and stagger past them sitting on the front porch together and not so much as look at the two of them, and he would smell like beer and puke and sex and she would watch him stumble up the steps and normally go after him and scream at him about where he had been and all the time knowing that he would lie to her, but she would do it anyway.

Except that this time would be different. This time, she was sitting on the font porch with another man, and she didn’t know his name and he hadn’t asked her to sleep with him yet but she would if he did ask, just as soon as that drunkard husband fell flat-faced asleep on the kitchen floor.

He wonders all of this as they sit here together.

Yet nobody comes home. Not this night, or the next morning either. They sit side-by-side in old wicker rocking chairs that creak like it is cicada season and stare out at the day growing new and don’t say a word to one another. At one point he wants to reach out and grab her hand and see what she would do and what it would feel like but he doesn’t know her name yet and even men like him know to abide by certain rules of dating and just being with women in general.

Eventually they go to the kitchen and rinse their mugs out with slow running water from a kitchen sink still full from breakfast lunch and dinner things from the last two days. It is light out, morning now, and the sun is hazy and shaded and the day looks like it will never come to full light.

He looks at her and wonders will she ask him to her bed or should he just rent some space on the living room floor, cold as it is on the bare floorboards and dirty too with filth plenty of days old he is sure. He looks at her and wants to tell her how he is sorry for having to put her into this mess and realizing as well that it is not his fault entirely, as she is the one who chose to let him stay. No matter. She’s full grown, after all. A woman can make up her own mind about a man.

He wonders does she have a phone, looks around the dingy kitchen where they stand, and realizes he hasn’t heard the annoying trill in the two days, now three, since they have lived together if you could even call this living. He doesn’t ask her, only looks around some, and thinks that this type of woman probably has no use for a phone anyway if even she has electricity at all. He trods heavily over to a sofa with a pattern of faded roses and doesn’t look back at her in the kitchen but knows she is there watching him, wondering about him. He falls to the sofa in a dead heap. Dust rises angrily and then settles back into crevices and onto surfaces, carefully covering everything, a soft blanket of dead skin and fragments of earth.

He dreams of the woman that night, alone in her bed, only it is not her. And she is not, he can see as he creeps silently closer, alone.


When he wakes it is night again and he doesn’t know how long he has slept and he doesn’t know where the woman is. He wonders what the townsfolk are doing, wonders if the discovery has been made yet, why no one has been to find him. How long would it take? Surely, it was only a matter of time.