she thought this was the last time.
She was standing right beside the antique clock.
Her words on time seemed especially important as a result.
She unbuttoned her men’s dress shirt and pulled my hand inside it.
The touch of her skin created both pleasure and pain for me.
I withdrew my hand from both.
She said that she didn’t know how she would get through the summer without it.
I agreed that it was a great show and much better than I had expected.
She took me to the bedroom.
She took off the shirt and the underwear.
She was not talking about the show anymore but she was still crying.
She told me that she thought something big was about to happen.
She said that if she had a bicycle bell she would ring it.
I told her that maybe she was psychic after all.
She pulled my hand toward her.
I withdrew my hand again.
This time there was more pain in it for me than pleasure.
I walked around the room.
I was so alert I thought I would never sleep again.
I found the shirt she had removed and wrapped one sleeve around each of my fists and placed the span of the shirt across her neck.
At first she was amused because she thought that I was making fun of the show.
Then she was excited because she thought that I was not.
Then she was terrified because she knew that I was not.
She tried to say my name and then her husband’s name and managed to say both in a sense which meant that she was saying neither.
She said my father’s name which I did not understand.
She said no.
Her right eye went blind and the left eye soon followed.
I lowered her onto the bed.
That was the fourth thing I had to do.
I took the shirt and went back through the living room collecting the wine bottle which was the only other thing I had touched with my bare fingers.
I went out onto the road.
The night felt warmer and I said so out loud.
After twenty steps or so I turned and looked back at Regina’s house.
The television was still on and its blue light flickered through the windows.
I turned back around and found a trash can and stuffed the bottle inside of it.
I found another trash can a half-block later and stuffed the shirt into it.
I went back up School Street just as I had come with nothing in my hands.
I drifted right and wondered what the sea and wind would sound like coming from my left.
I wondered if it would sound like a sentence being read forward.
Two policemen in a car passed by and gave a small wave and I gave an even smaller one.
I was minding my own business.
WHEN DEATH SHINES BRIGHT
BY DAVE ZELTSERMAN
Sandwich
Michael Yarrow drove to the quaint little sandwich shop in the quaint little downtown section of Sandwich and found that they had closed at five o’clock and he was fifty-five minutes too late. He stood for a moment trying to decide what to do. He hadn’t eaten since that morning when he had finished the second half of the BLT that he’d brought back to his room the day before. It was December and these quaint little shops must close early in the off-season because the few other bakeries and cafés he had passed were also dark inside. He could go to the Daniel Webster Inn and eat in their tavern or spend twenty minutes and drive to Hyannis where he’d have no problem finding fast-food restaurants. There was also a chain donut shop and a chain convenience market a little past downtown. Michael Yarrow decided he didn’t want to sit down among other people and he didn’t feel like he had the energy to drive twenty minutes to Hyannis. He was also trying to limit the number of places he might be seen. The inn where he rented a room, the sandwich shop where he bought his food, and the liquor store where he bought beer. He decided he wasn’t that hungry after all, and that he could pick up a couple strips of beef jerky and a bag of potato chips when he bought his beer, and that would be enough.
Michael got in his car to drive the three blocks to the liquor store, which would also take him out of this postage stamp–sized downtown. The buildings were either restored Victorians or old Federal-style houses covered with weather-beaten shingles. A two-hundred-year-old church had been converted to a restaurant that was closed, and an even older church had been converted