Beauty

She remembers the first time he told her she was beautiful. It was on their third date and it was over dinner at the local Spaghetti Factory (all his budget could afford). After sourdough and small talk, halfway through their second glass of the house red, he casually threw it sideways into a conversation about exercise. "You run seven miles everyday? I'll have to tell my friends that's how you stay so fit and beautiful."

He said it with a hearty laugh and she laughed right along, hoping that her exaggerated smile would hide the reddening of her face. And she wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Was it a joke, did he mean it, was he being kind or cruel or clueless, was it a casual slip of the tongue? All these possibilities were calculated, weighed one against the other, filtered through an intuitive algorithm. But before the cyphers could sort out the permutations, their waiter returned and it was time to order.

On his part, the utterance was purposeful insomuch as he had meant to throw the line in somehow. He had wanted to speak the words so many times before but he is awkward, insecure, clumsy around women and he didn't want to scare her away by being too forward. And so the bit about telling his friends about her beauty was by design. The reference to friends was his way of inserting one degree of separation between complement and complemented because he wasn't telling her she was beautiful directly, he was telling her what he was going to tell his friends. And the way he saw it, not only was he telling her he thought she was beautiful, he was also telling her that he was telling his friends about her. A two for one deal, if you will.

Dinner progressed swimmingly. Italian, even when inexpensive, always makes a meal something of an event. And though the pasta was boiled beyond al dente and the sauce lacked any sort of refinement, it was more than thirty dollars would have gotten them anywhere else. At the table, the topic of beauty (hers or otherwise) never came up again, but that one line was on both their minds.

The rest of the date went well. Buoyant on the swirl that comes from being lightly dusted by alcohol (they'd finished the bottle between them), they segued effortlessly to window shopping then a movie then cafe cappuccino and finally the walk back to her house.

Telescopes

"Give me a topic," he says.

And she replies, "telescopes."

And he spins a tale about a boy named Will who was an assistant to Johannes Kepler. He worked in Master Kepler's lab, part willing slave, part apprentice, all about stars. Glass was everywhere in various states of polish. There were charts, graphs, pages pinned to the walls, spilling over on desks, crumpled on the floor. Will made the mistake once of tiding up, but was quickly put in his place with a few sharp words and a rap to the back of the head by a ruler.

"Don't touch it, don't touch any of them!"

The Fisherman and the Farm

Then there's the story of the fisherman who, unlike Ahab, chose to let the one that got away get away. He pulled up his poles, turned the bow towards shore, and throttled up the engine. Done with years at sea, he decided to try his hand, finally, at farming. As he piloted his boat, he imagined the joy he would see in his wife's eyes when he gave her the news - because she knew as well as he that the sea had been his first love. Until today. He rehearsed the words he would use to tell her, speaking them into the wind. He tried different versions, each simpler and more to the point, until he decided on two simple words. "I'm home."

Just before he pulled past the buoy that marked the entrance to the harbor, not ten feet off his starboard side, the water erupted as if shot out of a cannon and within this column of water, a fish like the one he had been chasing throughout his life. And as in movies, and as in memory, and as it is during those fleeting, pivotal moments in life - time slowed to a crawl, slow enough that he could trace individual trajectories of drops within the cascade. That is, he could have if he was watching the water, but he was not. He was transfixed on the glorious, silver specimen rising up out of the deep, pelagic blue.

Time continued to slow, winding down like a record player after its plug is pulled. And this fish continued its ascent, up out of the water. It reached the apogee of its arc through the shimmering, salty air, and for one transcendent instant, it hung there as if mounted on his wall by taxidermy. In that moment, the fisherman was transported back to his house, three streets back from the pier. No, it wasn't he that was transported, it was more that his trophy room materialized out on the open sea, framing itself around the fish right at the spot that he'd been reserving for this one last token of the sea.

There was a splash and the sting of salt in his eyes. The boat rocked, caught his sea legs unprepared, and he nearly fell over but muscle memory kicked in and kept him upright. He shook the water from his hair and the fish was gone. He raised his right hand to wipe his eyes. His sleeves were wet, soggy, soaked. With his left hand, he throttled the engine back, all stop.

And though the fish was gone, and though he was still there out at sea, his mind lingered in his trophy room. There was the space in the corner where he had intended to mount his prize. Without it, the room seemed incomplete, empty, wrong somehow. In this space, a need to fill it, to set things right. He could feel the need crescendo, morphing into desire, flooding his heart with bitter want, a livid thirst to complete the room with this one last prize. And then his wife walked in, wrapped her arm around his waist, tilted her head, resting it on his shoulder. And she whispered into his ear.

The propellers spun the sea into a frothy foam. The bow pushed forward through the choppy waters. Thoughts of corn, carrots, leeks, and radishes (all of them organized, row by row) ran through his head.

Consequences

Done with his morning routine (shower, shave, brush, floss) difficult with unfamiliar, borrowed tools, but they got the job done. She, the nurse with the early shift, had gone hours ago leaving him towels and toiletries, travel size and spare. He holds them, used and bundled together in the damp towel, unsure what to do with them. He looks at the tangle of folds on her bed, winces and looks away. He turns and surveys the rest of the room. He checks his watch and sees that there's time enough to make it to work.

They first met at church, of all places - an old, conservative, starchy ordeal. He started going there his senior year in high school and stayed through most of college. She started attending a few years after he started, but then he left there to attend a newer, more contemporary service - one that he thought better suited his younger, more agile faith. He went to this church for five years but hip fades as does the multi-media dazzle. He didn't know if something in this new church had changed or if something inside himself had changed, but it didn't matter because the nexus of spirit and truth that first drew him to this new style of worship wasn't there anymore. And so after he realized that he hadn't had a single experience he would call spiritual in over six months, he returned to the conservative, starchy 11:00 service. He didn't know where else to go, so he went back to the old, the familiar, the comfortable.

And that's where he saw her. Again. And the five years between them had been more than kind to her, they had refined what was fair into something more striking and profound. And most miraculous of all, he could tell by that gleam in her eye that she was more than just happy to see him again. In the time before he switched churches, they would flirt and laugh and tease. But his faith was stronger then and it was this faith that helped him see that his attraction to her was purely physical - that he did not love her beyond what she did to his hormones. And so spiritual mind enforced itself over sinful matter and all was innocent and well.

His faith then was so simple, so sure. God was a rock, a lion, a lamb, and Jesus loved him because the Bible told him so. He looked out at the world and wondered how unbelievers could be so damned evil. But complications arose, the messiness of the world found its way into cracks, fracture points, fissures of his belief system, and when push came to shove, he found his Sunday School lessons woefully inadequate to tackle the hard truths of the world.

That was no matter though. He understood that the world was larger than he was and that God was there watching over him. So long as he felt the presence of God and sensed his direction, he was assured and blissfully content. And then silence fell. The presence and the guidance faded away, dispersed into thin air like the fog at dawn. No matter what he tried, no matter how much he made himself pray and read and sing and fast, nothing tasted anything like the sweet luxurious comfort of the Holy Spirit. And really, what can one do to penetrate the ironclad silence of God?

Back now at his old, familiar church with a more fractured, fragile faith, things were different between the two of them. He sensed it the moment they met again after his years away. It was in the way she hugged a bit too hard, looked his way a bit too long, touched a few too many times. Just as time had distilled her features to the essence of what he had found beautiful about her, so it focused and honed their formerly innocent flirtations into something more serious and intentional.

In part, he had returned for just such affections. He didn't reason it this way at the time but he was seeking from her what he had lost from God. And isn't this what's been done throughout time? God goes up the mountain and his followers down below mold themselves a golden calf to commune with - something tactile, solid, and predictable. Something there. For them a calf, for him a woman after his attention.

He gave himself to her. It was far easier than he could have imagined. Effortless and effervescent, lunch gave way to a walk in the park that wound up in a movie theater which led to dinner and rather than waste their money on dessert, they went to her apartment to finish off the slice of cheesecake in the refrigerator - the slice she ("oops, I forgot") finished off the week before. But better than that was the Amaretto in the cabinet - a sip on the sofa, a sip on the bedside, a sip spilled between the sheets.

Sin is a strange thing. Truth be told, this is exactly where he wanted to be but sin knows he would not have naively followed the steps that led to her door and so sin spun it around, told him he was going back to his old church to find God and perhaps to see her again. Bait and switch executed to perfection. Innocent compromises, little white lies exchanged between want and reason. Justifications, one after another, each more outrageous than the one before. Had he started the day in her bedroom, it would have been a simple thing to forego temptation and to walk away, but their affections had been building since noon, and the law of inertia is inflexible.

And now he looks at the tangle of folds on her bed, winces and looks away. He turns and surveys the rest of the room. He checks his watch and sees that there's time enough to make it to work. But he can't. He flips open his cell phone and calls in sick. And for good reason. He feels nauseous, violently ill, deathly. Up until yesterday, he had been faithful to the Lord. He was saving himself for marriage, for one woman forever. He had been steadfast, hard headed, adamant, even arrogant - holding himself above friends with less fortitude than he. But no more.

He drops the towel in the middle of the bathroom floor, turns the lights off, locks the door and rushes out to his car, parked in the street. He fumbles for his keys, drops them, curses. He finds the car key but somehow inserts it awkward and the bundle falls to the ground again. At last in the car he guns the engine and speeds away, barely missing the car parked parallel in front of him.

On the freeway, caught in traffic, he feels something new. Behind the guilt and shame, behind the anger at his careless self, behind the soft, lustful memories of skin, sensation, and the fiery, concussive consummation, there is something else. It's been so long that it takes him a while to recognize it but when he does, he hurls it away, tries to block it out of his mind but as absent as it's been these last few months, it's here now and he knows that God's not going anywhere. And what can one do to avoid the ironclad presence of God?

He surrenders and begs for unholy forgiveness. In this moment he understands what motivates the ascetic, flailing his body, ripping skin from flesh to show the Lord you're sorry because praying it just doesn't seem anywhere near enough. But he has no whips with which to render himself. All he has is prayer and these salty, slimy tears.

Past the traffic, through the streets, up the stairs, he's back home, finally. He's had his time with God and though a part of him wants to still feel guilty, to still feel sorry, the greater part of him knows that what's done is done and that God is still full of that amazing grace made manifest most clearly in his forgiveness. And so he simply gives thanks and praise and wonder and awe. He basks in the favor of God, lost in ineffable bliss until the buzz of his cellphone brings him back. He pulls it out of his pocket and sees her name on the caller ID display. And it's clear to him now, more than ever before, that while forgiveness is free and forever, consequences remain.

Hospital

Stitched, bandaged, pampered in a way. Interrogated, counseled, consoled. Now alone in her bed, hospital remote in hand. Buttons for the television, for the nurse, for the bed, for the lights. She turns everything off but keeps the bed back elevated. She closes her eyes, wants to sleep but knows sleep won't come. It's quiet, still. She's tired but still too full of ideas, questions, confusion. She tries to concentrate, to focus on one thing at a time, but they all seem layered, related, cross pollenated.
If her mind were a room, her thoughts would be a floor full of clutter piled in places from floor to ceiling. But back in the far corner, something is drawing her, compelling her, beckoning her towards itself with a subtle kind of warmth. It's the one still thing in the shifting mess. She pushes aside the tangle of thoughts towards this warmth but before she's two steps in its direction, she recoils and then freezes in her tracks when she recognizes its source.
The chaos in the room presses in upon her once again but the clutter is cold and the corner is warm. And so despite all the advice against it, she leans over the side of her bed, picks up the phone and calls home.
He picks up on the third ring. "Hello?" His voice sounds so small as he says it, as if he's been hollowed out.
"Hi, baby." She hadn't intended to use a term of endearment, it just slipped out as if by accident or by reflex habit.
"Janet, I. . ." He's caught off guard. He wants to say he's sorry but the word sounds so pathetic, so inadequate, so ridiculously cliched.
Hearing his voice, she's reminded of the home, the life they've built, the comfort and the safety. Despite all that's happened tonight, despite all that's been lost, she still longs for the comfort of home.

Bathroom Floor

On the bathroom floor, Laura is shaking, holding a baby blue towel to her nose, blood slowly turning it purple. A million thoughts swirl like the stars that circle her head. She's seen them before, these stars. She remembers a time when she thought stars circling one's head was just a silly cartoon convention. But then there was that night four years ago, the first time he hit her, that time between her jaw and her cheekbone. The world faded to black as her vision spun around along with her head. It was a slow dissolve, she saw the floor rising to meet her before things went entirely dark. She couldn't have been out for long because he was still standing where he had been that painful instant ago. The thought of what had happened had not settled upon her yet. Her ears were ringing and she shook her head to get her senses back. And then she saw them, little points of light, bright white centers with fiery orange edges. They orbited around her like tiny neon carousel horses.
And now here they were again doing the same mad laps around her head they did all those years ago. They flare and disappear, fewer and dimmer each time. But thoughts remain, all of them vying for equal time and attention. The thoughts take the form of fearsome questions – why did he, how could he, what did I, stay or go, where could I go, is my nose broken, how will I hide or explain the bruise. And on and on and around again, amplified with each recurrence. They cycle faster than she can think about, let alone answer, them. They pass through her almost viscerally, causing her to tremble.
She can feel her grip on the present moment loosening. A crack appears in the floor, a space large enough to get her fingers between the edges. She prys the hole open and finds that it expands effortlessly. There is darkness beyond, a kind of oblivion. It calls to her, beckons her forth, offering her the blissful tranquility of a mind unhinged - the luxury of soft thoughts, blurry edges, and kaleidoscope ideas. She eyes the opening, head cocked to the side like a puppy issued an unfamiliar command. The crack is widening on its own now, she retreats away from the inching edge. She scampers to the far bathroom wall. She is afforded a margin of safety but despite its sloth-like pace, the creep draws towards her.
She looks around for anything that would serve as a kind of defense. She gathers what ammunition she can and hurls it at the void - shampoo, conditioner, skin cream, and shavers. They are all swallowed, slowly as if dissolving into tar - held, in mid-air, aloft on the viscous surface of the widening maw. Its appetite is relentless, patient, endless.

Outside the door, he hears the clatter. Still unsure of himself, he hesitates then runs to the door. He knocks softly then calls her name. More items hit the floor and he hears something shatter. He knocks louder now, calls her name again, asks what's going on, pleads for some sort of response.

She is fixated on the hole in the floor, still carrying the items she's thrown at it. A kind of terror mutes her, as if cotton balls have been stuffed into her mouth. She wants to scream the void away but she makes no sound. From somewhere beyond the black mass she hears a sound, muted and indistinct. And yet, familiar. She cocks her ear towards the sound to get a better listen. She grabs the crystal vase that sometimes holds flowers, empty today, and launches it at the void. It too is caught, stuck, it hangs in the air like an unresolved chord.
And then that sound again, louder this time. The sound becomes a voice. She tries to divide her attention between the hole and that sound but it is nearly upon her. She can reach up and grab back the things she's thrown at it. But she does not. She cowers closer into the corner and shuts her eyes tight. Now, with her eyes closed, she listens again for the sound. It's him, he's calling to her. Fear of falling into the thick of the black hole replaces her fear of his violence. She whimpers his name and asks for help. The hole, as if in retaliation, presses in upon her faster now. She calls his name again, this time with full voice.
Over the surface of the ooze, she sees the door open. His face parts the darkness like the red sea. The items held aloft come crashing to the ground. She bolts through the center of it and rushes at him. She wraps her arms around him. The unexpected impact catches him off guard and he takes a step back to absorb the inertia. He is bewildered but decides to make the best of it. He wraps his arms around her in return.

And then like a SWAT team Flash-Bang canister, like a fast-ball into a catcher's mitt, reality snaps back into place and she remembers it all - his fist, the pain, the blood. She recoils away from him, pushing him away again with a mixture of horror and revulsion. She looks back and sees the mess she's made, the broken vase. And something entirely unfamiliar, red pools of blood that she does not recognize - she bled from her nose on to her dress and into the towel but not on the floor. An awareness of a new pain comes upon her, not from her nose but from her feet. It shoots up her leg now and she crumbles. She pulls her foot around and sees three, maybe four tiny but not insignificant glass shards gleaming ruby, bloody red.

She closes her eyes and cries. She buries her face in her hands but her nose explodes with pain. She releases a yelp then returns to the business of her tears, hands at her side, palms up, resting on the floor.

"I'll call for help," he says and runs for a phone. More lost than ever, he is glad, in a way, to have this task - in the mad confusion of the last few minutes, calling for help is the only ordered thing he's been able to do. He wants to think - of her, of what to say next, of what to do, of what she was going through in there, of what's become of her, of what's become of them - but he forces himself to concentrate on these orderly steps: get the phone, call for help, get the phone, call for help. Over and over again until it's done.
He picks up the phone, looks at the dial pad, and tries to remember the number for an emergency. Get the phone, call for help. Step by step, one thing at a time. He presses the numbers: nine, one, one. He focuses on necessary details only. He stays on the line with the operator until help arrives. A fire truck, an ambulance - first responders. And then a police car. Questions are asked, reports are made, she is taken to the hospital, he is instructed to stay away the mandatory twenty-four hours following any incident of domestic violence. He does not argue with the authorities.
After everyone is gone he surveys the apartment. For all that's happened, so little has changed as far as appearances go. That seems wrong somehow, incongruous. He returns to the one place where evidence of what has transpired still remains. The blood on the bathroom floor has coagulated and dried. It looks nearly black now. He thinks to clean but then his cell phone rings. He answers it where he stands, "hello?" His manager asks him about the report due in tomorrow. He does not answer. He just keeps looking at the mess on the bathroom floor.

Duffel Bag

She turns her attention from the man knocking his head against the window to her duffel bag in her lap, to the task at hand. As she understands it, there are two kinds of pivotal moments in life. There are the ones that are thrust upon you, like the day a child gets killed by a drunk driver, the day a tornado splinters your house, the day the plane you're flying slams into the North Tower. And then there are the ones you thrust upon the world. Hers will be of the second sort, and what a thrust this shall be.
She runs the checklist through in her head. She opens the zipper just so, reaches in and inventories the items one by one by touch. Under normal circumstances, the whole scenario would be an impossible thing to attempt but for her, it's as natural as Darwinian evolution.
It's bitter fruit, it took time to grow, it was nurtured by good intentions gone wrong, principles imposed upon her as prison, guidelines enforced as law, opportunities to volunteer unmasked as obligations to serve. The church where she worshiped was ripe with promises - promises with a price. A lesson in service became a commitment to help out in what they called, Children's Church - a place where elementary school kids could go to learn about Jesus away from the more mature service that their parents attended. This service, she was told, would be seen by God as a seed that would reap a harvest of blessings - financial, social, spiritual, you name it. The transactional nature of the promised exchange was not spelled out in so many words but stripped to its essence, that's what it boiled down to.
And so she served in this ministry for which she had no passion, no aptitude, no experience. It was frustrating and stressful and when she made mention of leaving it became an exercise in guilt management, an exercise she was not able to win. And so she served. In the end she was only able to break free by simply not showing up. And so one Sunday morning she made the right turn to the mall instead of the left turn to the church. She turned off her cell phone and went from sale to sale and to stores whose wares were not on sale.
At home that night, there were five messages on her answering machine, thirteen on her cell phone. She deleted them all. When she finally got the call, she was not polite, she did not waste her time, she simply told them she was done, this was not a break, this was her telling them she wasn't coming back.
It wasn't like her to be so curt, but she was done placating them.
And the blessings never came. All the time, energy, and frustrations she had sowed, all the ink marks that wouldn't come out of her dress, the bruises from falling over misplaced toys, all the crow she had to swallow from parents with unreasonable demands. From all of that, she did not reap a harvest of blessings. Instead, she found she had grown a bitter tree. It reeked of disdain and scorn for the church. It was gnarled - it's limbs twisted in some awful macabre pose. There were no leaves, no flowers, no fruit save for one bright red bulb clinging to the topmost branch. She took and ate of it and the poison birthed the plans she was now carrying out. Step by step, note by note, wrong by wrong.