Stay Here

It’s too late. He lies there unblinking, popsicle frozen, a half-whispered sweet nothing on the edge of his lips. She lies there too, annoyed. Both proving magical points on a bare mattress, no pillows, no A/C. Sweating, sweating. Their lungs and hearts beat, sync quicker than you’d think. Outside, midnight turns to morning. Time ages in a permanent way. Births and lost fingernails, screams and secret smiles, cakes and whispered wishes, snow storms too heavy to shovel and forgotten virginities, grandma telling the same story every July 4th and second opinions, lung cancer and talking with ghosts on television, spinning globes picking a vacation and electric bills, wheelchairs and grade school sweethearts and gray hairs and eating until your stomach hurts and broken dishwashers leaking to the basement, a flood. Maybe they had a chance, beckoning.

The frozen couple lose the studio apartment. Unpaid rent. Unpaid utilities. Men with beards and shoulder tattoos arrive in a truck to empty the room. The men carry them, still frozen on the sweaty mattress, to the sidewalk. The men padlock the door.

The sun escapes. It’s so hot the horizon quivers like a mirage might be coming. 

Humidity builds in the stratosphere to a point of eruption. Rain falls, soaking their underwear see-through. Lightning crackles in the summer clouds. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were crying.