Those were the last three words that reached me from your mouth. They penetrated me when I
barely conscious and it was left to my waking mind to understand their implications when your presence did not make itself known in the morning, except for a subtle dent in the sheets beside me. I caressed that dent with an expressionless face. At least, my face felt expressionless. I wrote you. You wrote menback:
Dear ----
Do I think of you? Not much.
Do I plan on coming back? Not likely.
Do I love you? Of course not.
Regards,
HIM.
The letter I pinned up with a magnet. It makes great decoration for the refrigerator. That you
bothered to write back at all was unexpectedly polite of you.
You remember you meeting me. In the 21st and Desert Willow King Sooper produce
department. Rotten tomatoes had shamefully bled all over your otherwise pristine apron. Did you
approach me? I can’t be sure. We made contact. Like you had a real sense of the connection between
the purchase of spinach and loneliness. Or like I knew you were the type who is attracted to that sort of
thing: loneliness.
‘Can I help you?’
Yes. Yes. In so many ways.
‘I’m just looking,’ I said.
New idea, witty idea on my part.
‘If I asked you to name all the products here in the produce department, could you?’
‘Of course,’ you said, flashed your teeth in an upturned ellipse. A smile, they call it.]
Your teeth were Caucasian beyond belief. Fair-skinned like printer paper. No sign of a double
chin: your face was pulled slack against your skull without looking too gaunt. The rest of your body was hidden behind the depressed rumples of your blue shirt and khaki pants. Billy Idol haircut didn’t devour your charm like I thought I might. Nor did your Buddy Holly glasses. Your ensemble was very urban cityscape: chaotic and somehow functioning to your benefit.
I grabbed the first bundle of suspicious looking green vegetation I could find. The lunge for it
was stilted and desperate, so very coincidentally manic depressive. Shh. That’s a secret. But you knew.
‘That’s Kale,’ you said. That ellipse had children on the corners of your face. They’re called
dimples, I think. My father had those. Never with regards to me. With me he always kept his smile’s
children far hidden in the unobtrusive jowls of his face. Or maybe they hid in his moustache. That was
it. He grew his moustache so he wouldn’t have to smile too much.
I checked the label:
‘Damn, you’re good.’
Charm was your face at that moment you remember, I know. I know you know how charming
your face still is.
‘What can I say?’
You had sheep-shrugged shoulders playing off faux humble pie-jumbled innocence. It was a sly
persona to win me over. It worked so easily.
Invite you over. The thought passed from mélange conception to lip-stilted auditory articulation
instantly. You agreed of course. I used the kept behind your ear to write my phone number on your
hand. I pressed so hard I was worried I might stab you. Two kinds of blood on your apron would have
been too much. I laugh now at the thought.
I had no idea what superfluous sequence of events to expect for the evening. You were making
a house call; we were both making facile impressions for the other’s benefit. Me for your more so.
You’d agree.
A knock at the door and there you were with pre-liquor bottle dance in your step. Ready to go.
A drink and a drink and a drink. It was poison to my gut and aphrodisiacal to my head with the room
carnival-spinning in my line of vision and you there steady in my frame of vision, holding me in a
pathetic, damsel-in-distress slow dance all along the floral pattern of the living room rug.
And I was carried so strongly and swiftly to the bed. Did you drink any of the poison? I don’t
and can’t recall or remember. To the bed, stripped naked by purposeful sequence of events. I didn’t
want to break and shatter the logical course of our actions thus far. We had to keep going. Your eyes
without glasses vibrated out of focus before I could get a really good look at them too ruminate on their
expression. The clothes had fallen on the floor in self-indulged piles to pick up later
I felt really loved.
Did you?
For that night?
I hope so. One night like that is too inconvenient for me not to have accomplished something
That was a month ago. I got your name to get your address to write you a letter, which you
received and to which you replied.I already mentioned that. I’ll write you another letter.
Dear Bastard
Fuck you.
Sincerely,
Me.
P.S.
Sleep tight baby
....
Matthew Housiaux is currently a student at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, SD. He has enjoyed writing since the of beginning high school and has many fond memories of rainy or snowy afternoons devoted exclusively to writing poetry or a short story. He is majoring in Journalism so that, even if he is not able to pave out a career with his fiction work, he can insure that he will be writing for a living.
