They did not sit together. Next to, but not together. In the inky darkness they sat sweating in the late night noon, with the moon marking the starting point, directly above them where the line separating them started. An inch apart, maybe less. Maybe it was only the width of a single half truth and the denial of insult that kept her fluorescent leg from his. The poles of their misunderstanding pushed against one another, maintaining that malignant inch.

But they sat, hamburgers in hand, their discontent in the distance being soaked into the hungry bleached wood of a neglected picnic table, and did not waver. She shifted her shoulders to the left, banishing them further into the night air. She suffered this awkward position for the latent hope that it was the proximity that allowed the salt from his summer solstice face to burn the scratches laced across her pride, but not quite to scorch them beyond repair. But a woman's body will not lie and before she could think, before she could turn away the honeyed estrogen which would make her shift to him again, the moon to the earth, her shoulders had realigned themselves with her betraying hips, and closer still, the depth of a breath was between her shoulder and his. Splayed, parenthetical, she was curved toward him and in an unholy half second of negligence their heads might touch and her merry lie would be forfeit.

“Tell me a story.” She said. She would not ask. Every word must be more brazen now than ever, so that she might seem unashamed under the scornful gaze of her rejection. The need must be squelched, and the indignant flame quenched.

“Ok. You have to just believe it though.” He opened his hands like a book, comparing them, and then made a cup of them, the top two joints of his fingertips overlapping. He looked into them as if by will the very lines on his hands would magnify and he could read the story from them; and then he did. His words came out like the echoing of his heartbeat through his larynx quavering it's way through the desert air; the even rhythm of a slow reader trying to learn his favorite story.


His identity was comprised of this story and his creator had raveled it round and round into the circles of his fingerprints so that it could be packed along without hindrance into the very fires of hell. And it seemed as if a gypsy had read his palm, she might have begun as he did, and read it the same from start to finish. The cadence of his voice said that in his tomb his creator would come again, cup his hands as they were now, and read him this last bedtime story scrawled on his own skin.

In the silence that followed, the hours, and years, she dreamed of taking a single cell from his fingers or his tongue and amplifying it with God's own ears, as he does not appear to be listening anyway, and being sung to sleep each night by the humble back-patthing rhythm. And she loved him a little, in a faraway way, because he then spoke a simple truth.


He talked into the air, still reading from the tablet of his cupped hands, but for no one else but her, of a young boy, 16, who mowed the lawn. That was all. Of a moth that was injured and had to be moved from branch to branch so as not to be disturbed, and as it was cupped in those brown hand-tablets etched this magical story in them. Of a moth which had to be helped, in tender, small hands, whom the hunger of a spider had grounded. Of eaten wing tips, which could no longer catch the air.

And she sat letting her spider-eaten cynic heart lament uselessly flapping wings. It was a short story. All of three minutes he spoke, still with that slowness. When he said at the end of his tale that he sat on the steps to his house, with a tiny body flanked by spun smoke strung across the faintest floss in his hands, she froze. She feared so deeply that he would crush it, and put it out of it's misery, because the world is not full of flown away moths and the joyful reconciliation of broken wings and the air which would not carry them brokenly.

But he spoke of sitting. Of watching. Of holding. Simple, small, hopeful, dreamwords which were so far from her own troubled days. And then, she cringed at the ending, almost as much as she might have cringed had he forcibly ended the moth's sorrow.

He sat with her, until he watched her fly away. And in the honest percussion of every word, she felt her whole self tremble with fear at the juxtaposition of so much hope and the tiny breath of a chance that such a hope might be fulfilled.

 And in the story she heard his lie about not wanting her for what it was, she heard the truth of his hope for her chasing behind each clopping word like a child crying after a parade horse, but there was nothing she could do. The breath of similar polarity remained between their shoulders. Her curls did not brush his arms. And still, they could not sit together, despite the magic mothwing happy ending. The lie had been set loose, and it eclipsed the happy truth.