- - - -
- - - - And he knew that elsewhere there was life going on, all the life in the world, but for him it was not to be. This is what he knew. When he realized it he felt calmer and went to the window and looked down at the street, at the people passing each other and not seeing him. He looked at the top of their heads. Oh, he thought, I am so full of anger, and he tried to rid himself of the last bit of bitterness but couldn't, even in his calmness. All this life. All his life he had been angry. He checked his fall against the window with the tips of his fingers. Asleep on the bed behind him was his lover. Her hair was covered by the pillow she held over the top of her head. Down the street he heard the sounds of small children playing, their backs young and spry and their eyes for the most part sharp-visioned. His anger surrounded him like old friends who would never abandon him; and he knew this was so; he had read books to help him on this matter; but the books could only do so much and then he was left standing by the window so as to be alone and away from the scent of her buried hair. Her throat made small dreaming noises, and he turned to her. She felt she was an older woman. When she met him she thought that her life would never be the same: This is it, she had thought, This is the big thing. This feeling had lasted for weeks and had disappeared so slowly that she hadn't noticed its growing absence; she would notice its absence only later, after he left her and she wept for months the way she thought she was supposed to weep. Honey, she said now, come back to bed. He was an older man, older than her, but in the arithmetic of biology it always seemed that she was older than him and lucky to have gotten him for as long as she would, as she did. He turned around and walked slowly toward the bed and the warmth that he had left behind him when he had gone to the window. It was the middle of the day. It was toward the beginning of the evening. His life was waiting to start, and would, as soon as he left the room. She saw his newspapers and his shoes in the front hallway, his dog looking up curiously, his wife upstairs asleep as he said she had slept for years. Oh, darling, she said, and didn't even know what she was saying. Outside the city went on, as inconstant and betrayed as they were and felt they were. All this life. All his life he had thought of all the life that surrounded him without ever taking him in. It was the world that was to blame. She thought: How sad he looks. Her thoughts were only of him and that was the problem. He turned away from her on the bed, and she thought it a tragedy.
OTHER McSWEENEY'S STORIES:
Cat-Hating, Tobacco-Smoking Anarchists Need Not Apply: Housing Requests and Offers for Anti-World Economic Forum Demonstrators By Kevin Guilfoile About the Doorknobs of America, An Interview with Bruce Gerrie, Curator of the First Major Exhibit of Antique Doorknobs in the United States By Matthew Summers-Sparks How to Remember Names and Faces, Part 3: A Shopping List a Woman Can't Forget By Robert H. Nutt Here in the Komi Autonomous Oblast By Christopher Orlet Her Closed Eyes By Rachel Carpenter |
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.