Out here, on this retreat, that distance has decreased to an uncomfortable proximity. We have no collective task to keep us on the rails. We have nothing to cue us our lines. As a result, each of us is gradually being revealed.
Peanut leaned on a fence, panting, watching Ransom walk away under the staggered streetlights. The pain in his head was crystallizing, it shimmered and glinted. White facets strobed behind his eyes. He slipped between the bars of the gated construction area and meandered along a row of new homes.
Here around Tampa sometimes Leo and I have been on a horseback ride. We love animals and sight of hay and dirt, even if we don’t have skill for riding. Down Brandon Way, past all the supermarkets and dollar discounts and Kentucky Chicken drive-ups, there is pastures and quiet country.
We came home with black hands. We smelled like car engines. We looked like flat tires by the end of the week and it was just another thing no one understood.
She cradles the bunny to her neck. Her ring is thin and gold and has a small, dull diamond in it.
The man snorts. “Good way to get eat up,” he says. “With your goddamn eyes closed.”
The woman hums, her head bending over the softness in her hands. She smiles at the man. She had seen something in him and, as women sometimes do with men like that, worked to bring it out. She smiles at him again. The bunny flutters like a heart.
Whenever Joanna heard the drone of the phone hanging up, she regretted not hanging up first. Yet, every time, she stayed on the line, just in case he had one more thing to say.
We’d arrived at the age of irrelevance, the lot of us – except for Daphne, who was not yet 30 – so it was important to acknowledge we were still alive, among the living.