Noble Lies & The Things Implied

Cigarettes were, for him, always the triumph of context over reason. He never smoked them in America, but on the Continent, the air smelled wrong without the hint of acrid tobacco smoke about his clothes. Except now, he’d been in Europe so long he was always cold. He spent most of his mornings rubbing his hands together and trying to get the fluid slowly gripping his lungs to settle for the day's work. European editors were used to phlegmatic writers. American editors couldn’t be bothered to get up early enough to call in the morning. If his daughter called, she would have worried.

Still, she never called.


He wrote the same six pages every day. In those pages, she walked from the kitchen and collected a basket with blankets and pads of paper and brushes and paints. He would describe, everyday, that same dress, that same gold ribbon in her hair. And she would walk through the back woods to the clearing and his words would describe what her brushes would portray. Then, in his description and even in the room a bit, the air would take a chill and the light would go gray. Day after day, twilight would be creeping around her enclave, her clearing.

Then he would stop, light a cigarette and get to work.


Today, when he pulled his kerchief away from his mouth, it was streaked with red. Today, the phone would not ring, nor the day after. Today, in the six pages, she was grown and in a white dress and he didn’t follow her to the clearing. Today, he narrated as though wrapped in gauze and only half awake. And, in the distance, she sat on the swing he’d always meant to build in the woods and smiled.

Futurism Loses Its Way

She never could stand the cold without the snow. A sparkling, virginal blanket of white on the streets and the lawns and the windowsills excused a host of meteorological sins. The padded quiet of a world sound-proofed in snow was hushed and womblike and she felt like nothing could harm her. If the sun was deceptively shining, however, and the ground was dry, the frigid wind felt like the sting of a slap from God’s own disdaining hand. No scarf or glove or coat could take the cold from her mind or heart. It’s as though winter would take up residence in her and the weather only confirmed her suspicions.

Mostly, she stayed indoors breathing the stale dry air of radiators and cigarettes. She refused to eat the food that wasn’t in the cupboards. When leaves were colorful and off their branches, she’d salvaged a tiny child’s school desk from a dumpster and it had found a home beside her bed. The zeros of her alarm clock blinked red off the branches of a small plant breathing its last backwards CO2 breaths in a strawberry basket on the tiny seat. In the middle of the night, the rattle of her ringing cell-phone would shock her awake, trembling against the industrial metal. A single pulse of buzz-saw silence would plead from a foot left of her case-less pillow. She knew it was him. She told herself she probably didn’t care.

Every third day she’d get all dolled up to go out. She’d try not to scrape her cornea with her eye-liner pencil. She’d try not to burn her neck with the straightener. She’d try not to nick her chalky ankles with the razor. The cutest tights with the prettiest dress with the least comfortable shoes, but she’d rarely make it off the landing. She’d fall asleep in her Sunday-best, a stepped-on paper crane on the couch. A used up Kleenex of indifference. She liked the light of the television, but not the sound. She liked the heat of the coffee, but not the taste. She remembered sleeping, but not how. She never listened to the music he’d pretended to like anymore.

She’d done her best to be kind and maybe that wasn’t too impressive. He’d just stood there, letting the rain pour across him. He didn’t ask for the explanations she’d told herself just below the music all night. He’d dragged her there, to the middle of the road and wrapped his hand around her hand. He said something she didn’t hear about the rain and Hollywood movies. She just stared at his worn out converse and wondered where her air had got to. When it finally spilled out, he nodded and flipped up his collar, like he’d only just noticed the weather. She didn’t remember walking home.

The empty sky still refused to snow and the sun was impotent to quell the stark winter. She won’t get dressed today. She didn’t know last night’s rasp of cell-phone sadness was the last he’d ever try.