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By kevin urenda Date: 2003 Aug 04 Comment on this Work [[2003.08.04.23.38.9896]] |
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The memory of it left a coppery taste in his mouth. Three short glasses of bourbon would not wash it away. But now that he had his buzz on, he sat on the bench at his front porch, holding a burning cigarette. He drew the smoke into his lungs occasionally, but mostly he watched the trails of smoke rise like prayers to the night. It was the night, after all, that always took such good care of him. It was always the night that coddled him like a favored lover. Night always took him in after yet another discarded him, as women always did. But there was one. There always was. One who had always outshone those who came after her, and erased the bad remembrances of those who preceded her. She'd only said once that she loved him, and was careful to place this positive statement into a closely-cropped context. In the haze of his youth, he blew it off as just something that girls would say, expecially since it seemed her words circumscribed a careful equivocation. And in the haze of the present, wreathed in smoke, he finally saw in the slender space of the half-moment that went by, taking the thought of her up into the night sky. He marveled at the power of that moment, out of the blue, when he finally realized, so many years later, that she really meant it after all. |