He knew it was all over. He was down to bit parts and baked beans, and infinite hours at the crusted table nursing shots of Old Peculiar. He was tired of the smell of dead fire, of himself, of the screams as cops kicked random drunks even more senseless outside the back door. But she'd said to meet her here, after the curtain came down like a sickness for the last time, so he stayed til midnight, hopeful as a hundred other nights, and then walked home, no longer waiting, no longer thinking, just a papier mache lump reformed in the basin of losing it all.
Yet that Sunday, as the wind blew streamers of wet newspaper across the moon, in the patter of the rain over his dissolving steps he heard her laughing, shockingly close in the black rippling dark, posed like Love when she dismisses her bodyguards, and carelessly makes a throwaway cameo just to keep her hand in. He'd imagined Natasha for twenty years, her compound bow lips and blackbird eyes, and here she was, if he hurried, disappearing down the street while the winos gaped, trailing her spiny excuses like porcupines, to lead him to that submarine she kept, down in the River Styx.
March 2022
