Assorted Fire Events: Stories

WHAT I HOPE FOR

I DON’T want anyone to die in my stories anymore. From here on out it has to be a glorious life. The light in the late evening from the ferry to the island will glimmer and pop off the horizon, the last of the sun going down; they’ll lean on the rail, shoulder to shoulder, feeling the soft heave of the boat, knowing that once they arrive at the bed and breakfast — the little sachet of potpourri dangling from the closet rack, and a mint on the pillow — they’ll undress to behold each other in naked splendor. The next day they’ll rent bikes and ride into the headwinds until their thighs (they never ride at home, in the city) are tight; they’ll picnic far out, on the end of the island, in a cove protected from the wind. Only an occasional gust will grit their potato salad. There they’ll kiss slowly and he’ll lick the salt from her lips and marvel at the warmth of her mouth in contrast to the hard cold outside, over the cove, where the surf roars in. On the way back, with the wind behind them, they’ll feel the exhilaration of a jet going with the jetstream; they’ll spread their arms outward, spinnakers to capture the wind. Parking their bikes under the porch, locking the chains, they’ll wobble up to the lobby on weak legs. Oh so tired, they’ll be, so wonderfully weak-kneed, as if navigating on land for the first time in years; and in this anguish of exhaustion they’ll make love again upstairs, half dressed, and then fall asleep through the dinner hour, only to rise in the darkness with the shudder of the storm outside, and with that barely perceptible awareness that something had been missed, something of the utmost importance. In the hall, the door is creaking and the man across the way, who they presume is a loner, is wending his way to the bathroom (which they share), and they both listen, holding their breath to hear the sound of his pee in the water, which no longer makes them laugh the way it did the first time they heard it, in the morning, but now sounds like something that has to be done, cold firm water against water in a porcelain bowl. If no one dies in the story, this is how it will be: the two of them a day later getting back on the boat and returning to the mainland, watching the landscape slip behind the boat, the gulls dashing above the wake, and the wake itself smoothing out from the v, fading off into the eternal uproar of the North Atlantic.