Some Fiction

To cleanse the winterly palate, I've been working on some fiction. More bits to come as self-consciousness allows.

Moments passed and the couple continued unfazed. Trips up for air replaced the hum of fluid exchanging for other petting noises amid the local silence: the sound of her scalp being scratched lightly, the trill of her fingers against the wales of his cord jacket. They had to be European. Nobody else would pull something like this at the symphony, except maybe for a Mediterranean hyphenate. I leaned in a small way. Berlusconi juju notwithstanding, he didn’t look Italian.

He did look proud of himself. A beagle of vanity, he would point out the little wonders of the hall to her and smile, the cascade of the tiered boxes tumbling toward the stage, the order of the open space, all of which he was disrupting with his adolescent insistence. I guessed him all of 22. We were no doubt from the same decade and generation, but the seven or so years between us held an epoch big enough to fumble a life into, a minefield of diminishing entitlement.