(published 28th January 2019)
The kitchen is cold. Except by this floor vent. That’s why the table is so close to it.
The kitchen is dark too. Just lit by the lamp on the other table. Across the room.
It’s only five-fifteen, but it’s getting dark so early now. And I’ve shrunk, too,
with the winter days. It’s pointless to even try to get anything done.
Something plays on the radio. Barely. Maybe Chet Baker live in Italy. Maybe not.
Maybe the sound of a fork up and down a hot sidewalk. Then clinked on a pan.
I’m cutting onions for fish stew that I’m making from almost rotten fish.
And my face is burning; my eyes are flooded. Is it the salinity of tears that makes
them taste kind of good? You notice me crying and try to wipe it all away.
With your beautiful bony hands. Two birds not really trying to attain the capability of flight.
I say: Its just my lachrymal glands. They’re irritated by the syn-Propanethial-S-oxide in the air.
It makes me feel miserable to watch you accept my excuses.
But you do (you’re full of so much acceptance and forgiveness). And you ask:
Well, if you had to kill yourself, how would you?
I’d ask God to walk me out onto a beach and shoot me in the back of the head.
But does that count as a suicide?
If God is a part of all of us. If we all have God inside of us.
And then you started crying. Because of the onions too?
I don’t know. That’s not a question I remember asking.
And you never give me excuses.
Tony is a writer and an artist from Atlanta, who spends their time contemplating the language of subtle light in dark rooms, slowly succumbing to the desire to be a bat. This is their first publication.