shouldihavesaidstop

We separated all our things. I let her have all the pots and pans that we bought together, the French press, the rice cooker. I hid in the bathroom as she rooted around in our . . . my bedroom. I could hear drawers opening, furniture dragging, the closet door coming off its track like it always does and thumping on the floor. Muffled cursing. Finally we were in the front hallway. She was making two stacks of books mine and hers. I'm keeping "The Fortress of Solitude" I said. "You don't even like Lethem that much" she said without looking up. "Besides I bought that book in Europe at the train station in London, it has sentimental value." "I like Lethem all right" I said leafing through the book and turning my back to her. "Seriously give me my book" her arm snaked around me to grab the book. I held on and turned around into her kiss, slightly sour and tasting of orange juice and cigarettes. "I'll let you keep VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen" she said placing the book carefully on her pile. "How about that?"

ihearitisawaitingamenow

We buried him today. Does it make me a horrible person that I was bored at the funeral? There were forty-five rows of folding chairs - twenty two on the left twenty three on the right, twelve chairs in each row except for the front rows which had nine chairs on the right and six on the left. I know this because I counted them all, five times. It's not even that I was uncomfortable because it was a funeral and the body of someone they kept trying to tell us was our friend was lying in a wooden box at the front of the room, open for display like muffins or scones at a coffee shop. I just can't sit still. I kept adjusting and readjusting my tie. I know the lady next to me was watching. I imagined her naked and the two of us fucking in the bathroom for a few minutes. Then I felt bad. Not because I am a prude or anything or that a corpse could make me unable to get it up. I just knew we wouldn't be fucking in the bathroom later and that made me sad. There were forty-seven lilies in the right flower urn and I think forty-three in the left. I wish I hadn't worn a suit jacket, I felt all prickly and I wanted to get up and go to the bathroom all through the service. Now that I'm home I wish I had a sweater on but I don't want to get up off the floor. I poured out all the alcohol in the house as soon as I got home. I'm not sure if this was a reaction to the funeral or not. I think maybe I just wanted to make a statement, say something that I couldn't voice at the funeral. I don't think it was even about the beer and whiskey, I think it was the lack of something I really wanted. Like I was pantomiming not talking to him, kissing him, waking up next to him with every bottle I pour down the black yawning mouth of the drain. There were thirty four bottles in all.

whenwebecomelandmasses

At times he felt that his breathing had become an insistent nagging thing. He began to see his lungs as these twin bullies that rose him, chest heaving, from sleep and into a grey smear of a world. The sound of air whistling over his palate or out from his nostril began to grate like fingernails on a chalkboard. A consistently taunting metronome. He began to hold his breath as long as he could. Anytime he spoke it was in great gasps and spurts. He wished that he could just absorb oxygen out of the air as he sat, inert like the continental shelf, sloping down off the coast into the green slumbering depths . . .