Musical Interlude

Frank Reynolds, 57, Retired

Holding onto his wife for dear life as the bus skids around another corner trying to keep on schedule he can't help but stare at the high school girls that got on at the last stop. There is a hunger in his eyes he no longer has a name for, but his hands remember what it feels like to touch and to hold. He looks down at his wife in her government-funded wheelchair and thinks back to when the two of them were new. Thirty some odd years ago he wouldn't have had that hunger in his eyes for anyone else. His wife raises her arm and extends her hand toward his face, the face of the man she has woken up next to for the better part of four decades. She still has that nameless hunger, wants nothing more than to satisfy it. But while the mind if willing, the flesh is feeble. Once again leering at the forbidden fruit at the back of the bus he mistakes her gesture for simple instruction and pulls the stop request wire. When the bus lurches to a stop a few seconds later he holds firmly onto the handles of his wife's wheelchair and backs off of the bus without incident, the girls at the back all but forgotten.

Lucas

The soft aroma of genuine regret, the way she hangs her head like a child being scolded, the practiced manner in which she seems spontaneous with her words, it almost works. Smearing darkness across her face, shivering from the chill of an enemy's ghost, she offers me another nicotine apology. I've taken her poison before, but the kick isn't worth the comedown. Find a new vein, sweetheart. This one's tapped out. So I leave. Another sidewalk suicide limping toward the ever after. It should have felt good to go. Heavenly fanfare and the cosmic reach-around. I settle for a chorus of sirens and a gentle pat on the shoulder from the evening's drizzle. It's more than I deserve. Soon, I'm home. My answering machine is haunted by the last straws and you'll be sorries of a dozen jilted lovers. What's one more? I'd exorcise them all, purge the innocent device of such venomous and loathsome energies, but it's cheaper than therapy. A private gallery full of electric echoes of my most glaring flaws and most painful failures, forever at my fingertips. Have to buy a new tape soon. I make a note of it.