Where Is Our Fanciful Futurism?

The linoleum is cold and plastic and awful. It hasn't been mopped in...well, a while, so its gritty with crumbs and a little sticky in spots. Four minutes have gone by and I'm pressing the handle down on the french press, with bleary-eyed diligence. Preternatural quiet. 50 grams of just-ground Trader Joes something or other. 30 ounces of just-not-quite boiling water. The black pours itself through its own cloud of steam in the early spring morning cold. Those fucking boilers...


Traversing the interior threshold from linoleum to hardwood, the steady pad of my feet weaves around the boards I know tend to creak. There's another I ought not to wake. The floorboards are just as cold, but worn softer with the years. More pleasant beneath my toes. The books are already stacked on the sill of the tall windows facing the street. Beside the works, on one side, are the sunflowers I keep in a copper vase and, on the other, the magnolias she keeps in an empty wine bottle. The curtains hang around them all like wedding veils. I lift them and kiss the texts with my fingertips, pulling today's old, dead friend. The mug, sitting beside the stack of tomes, steams the pane of glass in a conical opaqueness.


Wrapped in an afghan blanket from the first time I lived in this city, against the opening volley of cold from a tired leather sofa, I sip and read and stare at the street. A few folks trundle through the cold towards a days labor. A neighbor walks a dog. Too early still for school children. I pencil in a note or two. Underline here and there. I'll open my computer in another place. I can read in this spot, but never write. Couldn't tell you why.


I don't hear her steps, but I do hear the bedroom door creak and scrape across the surface of the floor just a little. I smile and, for a moment, don't read the words my eyes pass over. As I feel her breath on the skin behind my ear only a second before she presses her lips in the same spot, I stare at that photo of her from the lake so many months ago. A strand of her hair falls across my neck. I grin and tilt my head, revealing and yielding more of the tender skin of my neck to her kiss. She obliged, pressing her cheek into the hallow between ear and shoulder. I crane and twist back to look up at her, still sleepy-eyed, but smiling, arms folded.

"You always think I won't hear you. You think you can grind coffee on the back porch and it won't wake me up."


I laugh and she winds around to sit across my lap. She's only wearing a t-shirt and socks, with just the glimpse of boyish underwear peaking out. Its a t-shirt that, the first time I saw her wear it, we lived a thousand miles away. A t-shirt I could never wear again once she'd claimed it without knowing she'd claimed it. She curled in my lap like a cat intent on keeping me from my work, her arms around my neck and nose pressed to my nose.

"Let's bundle up and see the tigers today."


She knows I've got to work. She knows I need so much to read and to write and grade papers and... but she'll talk to the tigers and hold my hand and smile at me when I laugh at her one-sided conversations.

The evening's warmth will be my opportunity to read in peace, after dinner, while she gardened. The rest was too sacred to sully with responsibilities.