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We slipped into our old routines. Claire came and went. She pored over motivational messaging sales charts, plans for motivational websites, text messaging services.
I ate breakfast when she left, lunch when she called to check on my job search, dinner an hour after she got home. I sat at the kitchen table and tried to turn my first sentences into first paragraphs, pages, chapters.
It never worked. I was writing backwards. Each paragraph was a tar pit that kept getting deeper, laden down with history, detail, motivation, entire generations of backstory, until I gave up and started over with a fresh, clean sheet.
Valentine's Day loomed. I had no money. I had nothing to offer.
Claire sent me a text message: "Passion: There are many things in life that will capture your eye, but very few will capture your heart."
I sent back my most recent first sentence: "On the second day of June, Phillip Oshkovaka put his gun and canteen in a backpack, wrote a suicide note composed of nothing but the lyrics to Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," placed the note beneath the Christmas tree his mother tended year round in the living room, and slipped out of the house without a sound."
She shot back: "Believe and Succeed: What lies behind us and what lies before us are nothing compared to what lies within us."
I pulled on the pubic hair, which had grown back. "It's a heart," I said.
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I replied: "In every house there is a place where the mid-day sun alights for just a second, illuminating the surroundings, the dust bunnies and forgotten toys, the food scraps and bits of earth that have fallen off workboots, until they are as lit from within, glowing, touched by magic."
I watched the phone, waited for the little message ding. There it was: "Achievement: Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow."
Holy shit, I thought, she's right.
She got home early. "Happy Valentine's Day," she said. She handed me a card. She'd drawn a big heart and handwritten: "Love: The greatest motivator of all."
We stood there for a moment. She shook her hair out of its ponytail. I led her into the bedroom. "Make yourself comfortable," I said. I went into the
bathroom and got ready. After a few minutes I walked out. I was naked.
"What the fuck is that?" she said.
I pulled on the pubic hair, which had come back in. "It's a heart," I said. "It's the shape of a heart."
"That's my Valentine's present?" she said. She got out of bed, started putting on her clothes. She stalked into the kitchen and poured a glass of wine. I followed. "Put on some clothes," she said, "That's disgusting." She opened her briefcase and pulled out a stack of papers.
I stood in the hallway. I looked at the heart. I had let it grow back for her. I had spent an hour with the razor, carving perfect lines, fighting the urge to keep on going, shave the whole thing clean.
"I'm not looking at you until you put some clothes on," she said. "This obsession of yours is not productive."
What would John Folsom do? He would give her that look — quizzical, a little amused, a little dangerous.
I gave her that look.
"Are you having a stroke?" she said.
I walked into the bathroom and packed the razor and my toothbrush. I grabbed a handful of T-shirts and my yellow notebook. I pulled on a pair of jeans. I took the picture of the dog, stuffed it into my bag. I slipped out the back door and into the car. I started it up and drove, through the neighborhood and onto the beltway. I kept going. There was plenty of gas. John Folsom might speak with a German accent. Or Spanish. Russian.
No, I thought, finally. He would talk like me.
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
| Dave Housley is a co-founder and fiction editor of Barrelhouse magazine. His stories have been published by, or are forthcoming in, the Backwards City
Review, Gargoyle, Gulf Stream, Hobart, and the Potomac Review. |
© 2006 Dave Housley & Nerve.com
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