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{the beginning and the end} mark neely One afternoon I found Kate walking home. It started pouring. She brought me inside the sparse, clean house. In the hall hung a small Ed Ruscha lithograph of a hillside with letters walking upwards, a word I couldn’t make out “My etching,” Kate said. She didn’t look like she was being funny but I laughed, then kissed her, kept going until my hand was on her breast. Her nipple stretched the thin lace of her bra. My whole body flashed as lighting thundered on the window. Kate cooed, a distant dove but when I slipped a button open on her blouse she pulled away. “What good am I to you?” she said. “What good were goddesses to Greeks,” I answered. That had to be my best line ever. She told me not to be a fool. “You want a wife, some daughters running through the patio door.” Kate said she was no wife, she’d proven that already. And that was that. I walked all the way to the river where storm pipes gushed into the current like, well, you know what. Volcanoes in my temples then. We never touched again. |
