I’ve been busy getting marcmoss.net online, selling art, preparing for the next art show, making new art. Haven’t written anything in a while. Today’s post comes from a guest writer.Thank you, Armywife.The photo is a self portrait, taken in Medina, Ohio, winter 2005.

The story is fiction.

Waiting

He felt fuzzy. Cold mornings always did that to him. Staring at his
reflection, he wondered what exactly he was doing here. Meeting her,
obviously, but why? She knew he hated this, meeting in out of the way
places. Screw secrecy, he thought.

It wasn’t even his type of bar. Too bright, too frou-frou, it lacked the
dirty ambiance of a really good dive. The point of getting drunk was to
get as low as you could, down into the pit. Happy drunks were
irritating, spreading a sunshiny warmth over the pallid sickness of
drinking. He drank to wallow, drawing out his misery with the soothing
warmth of whiskey.

His disease, he reflected and amended it to diseases. She was another
one. He hated her, really. She was cold and demanding, asking more than
he could ever give. Oh, not his soul or anything so prosaically
romantic. She wanted him when she wanted him and when she didn’t, it
didn’t matter. If he died, her only emotion would be irritation at his
thoughtlessness. How dare he die without first being dismissed. He
couldn’t even remember why he bothered to show up.

But, he did know. He was honest. It was one of his few virtues. He
showed up because when they were naked, he forgot about how much he
hated her. It wasn’t love, he knew. It was warmth, her skin on his, the
sloppy tangle of limbs, feeling drunk while sober. No, it wasn’t love.
It was humanity, down deep in the belly where it counted.

Jesus, where was she? Late because making him wait for her was part of
it. Part of their twisted thing, whatever their thing was, he didn’t
know what to call it. Drowning was a good name for it. Losing the
ability to breathe because a primal force was stronger than you. Like
the whiskey, it washed over him and tested him. Like the whiskey, it
seduced him, calling his name in husky tones. Like the whiskey, it made
him feel alive.

It wasn’t sex, though. He’d had enough of that to be certain. Fucking
didn’t do this to you, didn’t turn you around like a cheap carnival
ride. Certainly there were easier, less demanding women out there. Women
who would happily take what he wanted to give and leave the rest of him
alone. Women who didn’t call to him like she did, didn’t make him weak
and dangerous.

He was feeling it now, the combined effects of the whiskey and the want.
It made him dark and a little wild, which only made everything more fun.
She used him, and he used her. In the end, he was still in a pretentious
bar on a cold morning, waiting for her. He didn’t care. He’d get what he
wanted, like he always did. Hate, he reflected, made everything easier.