muse

                           "Sing in me, O Muse, and through me tell the story..."
                                                         -Homer


I met a muse today, trailing the tips of her fingers along a wall, rough but unbroken. She walked without purpose; slowly, methodically, as if waiting for nothing to happen. Apparently it came as I walked by, for without any formal declaration, she spoke.

“Today is a day, but not any day, today is a day for tongues, I think.”

I didn’t bother to stop and frown, for there was no outward sign that she saw, let alone was speaking to, me. You can imagine my surprise when I heard her turn and follow. Still not convinced I carried on, without a glance behind. I imagined, as I found our footsteps slapping in time, that she was imitating my gait. She was a mimic, this girl, a fraud, a backwards shadow. And so we walked, went on this way for a block, before she stopped our charade, two hard soles tip-tapping on the blazing Blacksburg walk. Without meaning to, I stopped as well. She was tapping her shoe, a calm, steady beat.

“I’m talking to you, if you want.”

I turned, and stared; I felt I had earned the right. She was hard to see, somehow. I found myself squinting, so I stepped towards her, only to find she had stepped backwards. Another step forward. This time two steps back.

“Why did you say that?” I asked, sounding more accusatory than I meant to. She smiled, a little, just a touch. “Was it offensive to your senses, what I said?” She took a careful step towards me. “Don’t answer. I never like to know when I’ve offended. Makes the whole conversation hang, lag, just sit there like a large man looking out a window.”

I waited. She watched me waiting. Then she pursed her pink lips. “What I said; it just popped out of the air around you, that’s all. Nothing to do with me, really. You should’ve said it. I was just helping.” As she said this she walked past me and I felt a quick tug on my wrist. Only enough to get me going, and gone just as fast as it came.

”What’s your name?” I asked, lurching after her.

“Anything you like, really. Or don’t like, though that wouldn’t be very sporting. Or something you like too much to say it aloud, and so you keep it secret, tucked away for special occasions, like Christmas in September. That would be nice.” She never looked at the same spot for very long, I found, trailing her wake. She was eyes up and all over, flitting angle to angle across the wide Sunday sky. The girl smiled at everything, like nothing in the world could possibly be devoid of some slight amusement.

“I’d call you…amused.” I said, feeling awfully clever.

She stopped; a half second trip in her skip, but then back on her way. “A muse?” She thought for a moment. “Only if it’s never capitalized.” She leaned her head towards me and pointed skyward. “Wouldn’t want to piss off the gods, ya know. Muse, with a big M; serious business. Muse with a little M; well, that’s just silly, really, but I’ll take it. If it’s for free.” I waited for more, but found her waiting back at me, glancing expectantly at me every trip round the compass. “It’s for free.” I said.

She exhaled. “Good. Worried me there for a second….hmm, well what shall I call you?” She pondered as we turned a corner, into a park. “Suggestions?”

“Well, my name is-”

“No!” she hissed. “Never tell a stranger your name. At least not your True Name. Too much power for a strange Didn’t your mother tell you anything important.”

I shook my head and smiled. “You read too much science fiction.”

This stopped her, again. “Do not. And besides, it’s a much more prominent device in fantasy. Very rarely do True Names come up in sci-fi, unless you’re talking cyberpunk, and well, that doesn’t count very much, now does it?”

“No, I suppose not. Not really.”

This got her going again. We wandered for a bit until she found a fountain to stand in, which she did, without concern for shoes, sanitation or sanction.

“Aren’t your shoes-”

“On my feet? Yes. Why shouldn’t they be? Shoes can be thirsty too.” She looked at me as if I were making claims against gravity. She seemed so alarmingly tall, standing calf deep in the moving water. With a field marshal’s tone, she addressed me. “Now, quickly, tell me; moose, tuna fish or spider?”

“For eating?” I resigned myself to sit on the edge of the fountain, despite my possible complicity with its desecration. I decided to face away from her, though, just the same.

“For liking, silly.” She was making small circles behind me; from the sound, I could nearly feel the water moving against her bare legs.

“Spider.”

“Hmmmmmm. What kind of spider then, if spider it is? Quickly.”

“Do you…do you talk like that on purpose, or do you just talk like that?”

For an answer, I was pulled backwards with surprising force, just enough to tip me off kilter and into the water. When I surged up and out, blinking and red, I found her calmly watching from a step beyond the edge of the fountain. I was so shocked, I could only blurt, “Wolf spider!”

She regarded me playfully with eyes too bright to be real. “Hmmm.”

I shook my head, running my hands through my hair, wringing the water out and onto the cobbled stones beneath me. Again, too quick for something solid, I found her hands in my hair, pulling it up and on top of my head; a top knot. Abruptly, she let go, stepping backwards once again; head tilted to the side, one eye closed in silent reckoning.

“Sam. Short for Samurai.” She over-pronounced it; sam-mu-reye. “Well, it was lovely to make your acquaintance, Sam.” She bowed, a little.

Without another thought, she was slig-slogging away; her Cons leaving wet marks to dry quickly in the afternoon sun.

                                                          ---

My mother’s dining room table is capable of seating ten people and is old enough to know things about secession and to have been hauled down rutted dirt roads in an open wagon. The surface has been polished and worried so many times that what once was black walnut now slides under my hand like shiny asphalt.

“You’re quiet this evening,” my mother said, ending my historical analysis of her table. Every other Wednesday since I graduated from high school and moved out I have eaten with her; a table for ten only servicing two. “Your father was always quiet when he had something on his mind. He always waited for me to ask. Never volunteered.”

I sipped a fifteen year old red and glanced around the room. Picture of my father were everywhere, not obvious, but woven into the organic flow of the room. As I paused upon the only outspoken picture, a large painting of him over the fireplace, I wondered what words his hard lips would held back from his son. Introverted. Cowardly. Lacking ambition.

“I miss him too,” my mother said, apparently noticing the object of my staring. “This house is so quiet, when before it was always filled with his voice. I don’t know how, but he could talk and talk, sometimes not even making it all make sense, but his mind was always going, his mouth always filled with interest. He was always moving. Forward.” My mother was being grandiose, purposefully. She was describing everything she wished I was as aspects of a man she knew stood over me, though he was by now a comically shriveled husk inside a large, heavy box of mahogany.

“Have you applied yet? To Winstead College?” She sipped her soup, trying to sound uninterested. Trying to sound like this hadn’t been a bimonthly part of our routine for five years now. “I have the application.”

“Filled out?” Her excitement was unveiled. I had picked up the application after losing my job as an overnight hotel desk clerk. It was the last of five years worth of purposely dead end jobs. Janitor. Library assistant. Parking attendant. All things stationary, concerning themselves with mostly stationary things. My mother had nearly fainted when her son (“A Renner-Housman!”) had been the janitor of a middle school. “

“No.”
“Oh. Well you should.”
“I know.”
“Good.”

                                                       ---

The next time I saw muse was a Tuesday. When I looked up from the pavement and found her grinning inside of fifty feet, I tried hard to turn in my shoes, but my shoes wouldn’t budge. I had worn my Cons, and even as I tied them, I had known they were trouble. I silently resigned myself to the truth: she had been on my mind every second since our soggy-ended encounter.

“Too much like her.” I had mumbled to myself, carefully making the shoelace bunny ears meet. My nosy roommate was eating Lucky Charms out of a dirty coffee mug a few feet away and heard. “Too much like who?” He stopped eating; mouth full of milk and high fructose corn syrup.

I frowned. Dammit. “No one. I was talking to my shoes.”

It was my roommate’s turn to frown. “Your shoes? Did you meet a girl, Kelly?” My name is Kehl. But fuckstain with his milk mouth likes to call me “Kelly”. Don’t be too surprised at my language. I only curse here, with you. In the real world, well, I don’t say so much at all. “Sort of. I didn’t meet her…she attacked me. Sort of.” I finished my shoes and grabbed my keys off the couch.

“Girls don’t attack you, Kelly. No offense, man.” He always did that. Said something awful and then added something that he thought made it not awful. This was only a small portion of my dislike for him. “Who was she anyways?” He asked, turning back to his milk mush and cartoons.

“A muse,” I said, smiling to myself. “She stood in a fountain and talked about her shoes like they had souls and eyes and thirsty throats.” When I came back to the real, Milk Mouth was staring at me, mouth open, the back of his throat showing. “She what? She sounds like a freak, dude. And it sounds like she’s infecting you with her freak-ness.” He turned back to the television. “No offense.”

I took a moment to mentally picture myself lobotomizing him with a teaspoon. The effect was not as satisfying as I would have liked. So I left.

She caught me in a crosswalk; only that saved her from my flight at the sight of her. I’m not sure she could’ve caught me; her legs aren’t very long, you see. Regardless, I looked up and there she was, smiling like she had the Devil by the tail, dragging him behind her. I was already in the street. People would’ve stared if I would’ve turned and ran. I hate staring people. So I walked, hoping she would just pass me, or at least not follow, just mutter something sadistic and lyrical as she swept by. Instead, she hooked her arm in mine and swung around beside me.

“It’s too soon to be sure, but I think your life may be in danger, Sammo.” She lowered her voice significantly. “Serious business. Honest.” She smirked as she said it, tugging me left at the end of the crosswalk, instead of right, the way I went. We stretched like two kids pulling a wishbone, and she stopped, turning to face me. “Of all the times to follow suit, this would be the one. The big one that means stuff at the end of the day. Promise.” She tugged a little harder. A man and woman sitting on a bench started staring. I sighed, and her face lit up like a sunrise. “Good boy.”

                                                        ---

If muse had money, she never seemed to need it. We walked to a fruit stand on 42nd and Grand, and the little Asian man behind it brightened. He said something I couldn’t understand and she responded in kind, bowing politely, her voice high and clipped. He nodded, and tossed her a pomegranate and a banana.  She bowed again and we walked on. She weighed the two snacks in her hands; suddenly and seriously she was a great arbiter of fruit. “You can have the banana. Understand though, that I adore bananas, and my bestowing this one-” she held it out towards me. “-upon you, is a great honor.” She talked as we walked; a story about a pet goldfish gone missing only to be found many years later, fat and hulking, in the city sewers. I ate my banana quickly, quietly. When she turned into the same park, I feared she was angling another wet adventure, but she swung away from the fountain at the last moment.

“Worried, huh? No water works for you today, Sam.” she said, sitting down on the grass beside a bench. She patted the bench and so I sat, hands folded in my lap. She held the pomegranate up in front of her, turning it. “I love to eat beautiful things.” She reached deftly into her sleeve and produced a thin, bright object. Making several quick hand motions, the pretty little flash evolved into a gorgeously detailed butterfly knife. With pale little fingers, she started scouring the fruit, speaking as she did. “Have you ever seen a tuna fish? Like whole? They're astoundingly beautiful.”

I nodded, watching her fingers work. “I used to live by the ocean. We would go fishing.” Her little knife stopped working. “Tuna fishing?” I nodded again. She wouldn’t cut anymore until I looked up at her; I knew this some how. I did. Her eyes were the strangest color. I hadn’t noticed them before. They were something stretched between green and gray and blue; an admixture of golden brown silvered throughout. Boring people would call them hazel. They would be committing a crime.

She nodded, and smiled a little; her fingers started working again, sliding the bright little blade around the husk until all the red lay on the ground between her shoes. I frowned and she saw it.

“Yeah, different shoes, I know. But more than likely we weren’t made to match, Sam. Not that much, anyways.” She nodded at my Cons. “No worries, though. Mine are drying on my patio.” I looked up at her elfin face. I could not imagine muse living in a normal house, with normal things, like a patio. She smiled. “I know I know. The mystery.”

My face fell back to her shoes. They were bleach white Vans with rather generic rosy round hearts all over them. “Actually, I hardly ever wear shoes. Anywhere. Lucky you to find me in them two days in a row.” Slipping her blade into the side, she split the pomegranate and carefully separated the halves. Bunches and bunches of blood-red seeds clung to the halves, wet and sweet-smelling. She scraped one half clean of the crimson jewels and tossed them unceremoniously onto the grass. “For the yellow bird. Only the yellow bird. Be watchful. And hopeful, for me.” With quick strokes, she sliced the white fruit into four equal parts and set them on her knee. “Tell me about tuna hunting, Sam. Tell me what they looked like in the water. I’ve never been able to find a suitable simile.” She indicated the white fruit on her knee with the flashing silver in her fist. I took a slice, started to put it in my mouth, but stopped.

“Trains. You know those trains in Japan, the silver and blue ones that fly down the track at two hundred miles per hour? So fast that if you were on the outside, hanging on for  your life, you wouldn’t be able to breathe?” She nodded, taking a slice for herself.

“Those, I would say, are appropriate similes, muse.” I put the sliced pomegranate on my tongue and closed my teeth. It was sweet, but with a definite tang somewhere in the middle. The flesh was rough against my tongue but gave easily. I don’t think I’ve had better fruit since. Or before.

“Hm, that's a good thing to compare them to…I never really could pin something down to call them...they seemed so unreal, so shimmery. Like a gothic rainbow.” She grinned. “I guess I just did though. Gothic rainbows. Yes. I love my tuna fish.” She took another slice off her knee, ate it in silence for a moment, but then spoke though she wasn’t quite done chewing. “That's the only reason I started eating it, tuna, I mean. It used to gross me out for years and years and years... but then one day, about a year back, I saw a documentary about tuna fish in the open ocean…and I decided something that beautiful, I had to eat.” Her eyes glowed with some private memory. Then she looked at me. “But enough about me. Tell me about you.” She brought her little knife up again and lifted a seed out of the half-pomegranate still on the bench. She slipped it into her mouth and her face contorted. “Gah, sour one. They vary from seed to seed. Greatly, unfortunately.” She noticed I wasn’t saying anything, just watching her suck the seed in-between her cheek and teeth. Frowning, she knifed another seed. “Speak, or I’ll make you eat this. And I have it on good authority that it’s one of the sour ones.”

“What do you want to know?” I said, snatching the seed off the blade before me. I stuck it in my mouth. It was sweet. She raised an eyebrow. “Very good, Sam. Hmmm. Well, let’s start simple. If you were a woman and you weren't a stripper, what would you wear to a strip joint?” She smiled wickedly.

“I…uh. I wouldn’t even know how to begin to think about trying to answer that question.” I took the last slice of the first half off her knee and gobbled it.

“It’s easy, Sam. You start with I-” She raised her eyebrows, staring at me.
“I-”
“Would.”
“Would-”
“Wear.”
“Wear-”
“Something low-cut so all the strippers could take out my breasts and play with them...that's awful, but it's what all girls really want to do. Well, maybe not all girls, but most that go voluntarily to a female strip club. And if I were a boy that’s what I’d say because all boys are obsessed with seeing women play with each other’s breasts.”

I stared at her for a moment as she slipped another sour seed in-between her lips and made an ugly face. When she was done with that, she regarded me with her opalescent cat eyes. She was wearing contacts, I saw now, and had a pair of dark sunglasses slipped into the neck of her shirt. She waited. I waited. “Am I supposed to say all that?” I asked, at last.

“No.” She over pronounced the “o” and left her lips in a circle for a moment. Her eyes fell to the pavement; she plucked another seed and handed it to me. “What do you want, Sam. Really?”

“In general or specifically?”

“Either, or both.” She watched a man walking his dog; the strangest expression of disgust on her pretty little face. I started watching the man too. He was huge, probably four hundred pounds, and his dog was comically small, a tiny Daschund. When I was finished watching, I turned to find her staring at me again. “To be a superhero?” She pipped.

I shook my head. “Super heroes tend to die tragically. I want to die quietly.” She recoiled like I had struck her. “Why would you want that?”

“Because I want my life to be the loudest memory.” I blushed. Somehow she could make me speak before I worded my thoughts to not sound strange or crazy.

She slumped a little. “I either want to drown or die alone in a gutter, unloved or forgettable so people don't miss me. I find memories cause more pain than inspiration, though I’m not supposed to.”

“Bullshit!”

She turned and stared at me, light suddenly surging into her eyes again. I bit my tongue. My voice had been louder than I ever thought it could’ve been. “I’m sorry. I just can’t imagine you being forgotten.” I lowered my voice and eyes to the pavement. “By anyone. Ever.”

“That’s sweet to say, Sammo,” she said, lifting my chin with one warm finger. “But I watch people grieve everyday. Even for people before they die. They grieve their entire lives, for someone or another. I don't want that left when I die. It's the one emotion I can't stand people having...grief, especially if I caused it.” She sucked on a seed for a while, not present. When she began again, she sounded sad for the first time since our association began. “I tolerate it, but it's the only thing I'd fix if I could snap my fingers and do so.” Frowning, she scraped the remaining seeds onto the grass, and quickly carved up the fruit beneath. “Love isn't something I can control and I know it...and I know I probably won't die unloved...but if there's something I want…it's that. For my death to be anonymous.” She offered me a slice of pomegranate, but I was staring hard at the pavement. Her eyes narrowed a little. “You're going to argue with me about this.” She tossed her hair, a new and strange gesture. “And you don't know enough about me to do that very well.”

“I don't argue,” I said, too quickly. I scanned the grass, trying to find the proper verb. “I understand. I'm....accepting this.” I sighed and took the slice from between her thumb and forefinger. Our skin touched for the third time, but first. “There's little point to try and change someone's mind...it is the way it is because they are who they are. And I like who you are, so…no, I'm not going to argue.”

“So you like me, huh?” She was grinning, showing just the tips of her teeth.

I nodded, glancing up to find her eyes. They were bright; little golden galaxies whirling around within the great grey and blue and green, musing.

“Good.”

                                                      ---

“It’s a clockwork world, if you ask me,” muse said, battling the bowl of ice cream before her in maddeningly small sorties. She had produced her own spoon, eschewing the plastic one that King Billy’s Ice Cream Palisade had provided for her. It was a tea spoon, not just a small spoon, but a spoon used specifically for mixing things into tea. It was perhaps as wide as her pinky, and nearly pointed. She had selected King Billy’s for our celebration of being socially aware of each other for greater than or equal to a month. Her words, not mine. Aside from her rainbow sherbet with chocolate sprinkles and mini marshmallows, she wanted another gift as well. “Take me to your house. I want to see where you hang your hat, if you have a hat. I haven’t seen one thus far, but I assume you do. Everyone has at least one or two hats.” I swirled vanilla with hot fudge around in my mouth for a moment, trying not to seem pensive. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, muse.”

She stared at me for a moment. “Of course it is. And here’s why. Up until now it has been up to the gods and my dogged persistence to ensure that we see each other, as I do not believe in cellular telephones and you don’t venture out now other than to entertain your monthly habits with tu madre, or, to see me, when I leave notes at the library.”

I hadn’t quite figured that trick out yet. I have a voracious appetite for reading, and so I visit the library often, especially being unemployed. Every time I have gone there since finding muse, I happen upon a book I’ve wanted to read or just some book that calls to me from the shelf, begging for closer inspection. Inside of these books are handwritten notes, from muse. Generally they detail some rendezvous she’s planned for us. Such as King Billy’s Ice Cream Palisade, and implicitly my apartment.

                                                       ---

As soon as I found the door unlocked, I knew Fuckstain was home, and that he would see muse, and that was the primary reason I didn’t want her to see the place where my many hats were hung. He didn’t deserve, wasn’t worthy, couldn’t possibly appreciate, the experience. “Kelly?” His voice mixed with the inane babbling of a reality television program greeted us as I closed the front door behind her. She raised an eyebrow and mouthed the name “Kelly” at me. I opened my mouth, but closed it as she turned and wandered into the living room. Fuckstain was in his boxer shorts and nothing else, a parcel of fried chicken warming his crotch. He didn’t turn, but instead munched vacantly on a drumstick. “You should see this shit, dude. These bitches are so-” He turned grinning and found muse staring at him like a scientist examining a bacterium culture. “Whoa. Is this the fairy girl, Kelly?” The fairy girl took one more step towards him, wrinkled her nose, and then turned back to me. “You didn’t tell me you lived with a troll, Sam.”

“What? What’d she say?” She turned back to him. “I said you’re a troll. I’m a fairy, you’re a troll, I’d think even something eating chicken could complete that metaphor.”

Kelly stared at her, his brow indicating confusion and then the beginning of anger. “Are you fucking a feminist, Kelly?” He glared at me. “And she looks like she’s twelve, man. That’s fucked up shit. I knew you were a freak, Kelly, but I didn’t think you’d stoop to being a pedderass.” With that eloquence, he turned back to his bitches, and selected another piece of fried meat. I took two quick steps to close the distance as muse took one towards him and started to reach for the back of his skull. Applying the only amount of force I had ever dared, I jerked her away from him just as her hand neared his poorly shorn scalp and even clapped my other hand over her mouth for good measure. Eight steps and several menacing glances from muse’s celestial eyes and we were safe behind the door to my room. Immediately, she forgot about the troll slurping chicken parts in my living room.

I am neat. Orderly. Confined, some would say. My room is small but regimented in order to contain my collections. “Collections,” muse said, biting her bottom lip. She slowly crept across the open floor space to the four bookshelves that towered over her. Much like the image of the unbroken wall from my first sight of her, she ran her finger tips over my books and I couldn’t help but feel the electricity of apprehension slipping to awareness of proximity. My muse was touching my books. Little whispers of names: Douglas, Emerson, Herbert, Joyce, Rodgers, Dante, Niffenegger, Du Bois, Palahniuk, Niche, King, Cheever, Sedaris, Hemingway, Gibson, Bradbury. Here she stopped and selected a batter paperback, flipped to a page, and began reading. “The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.” She flipped again and read some more. “Stuff your eyes with wonder...live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that...shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.”

As much as I now regret it, it was the word “ass” that very shortly preceded the first time I kissed muse. It lasted longer than I had imagined it would; kept expanding, receding to almost parting, then swelling up again as some new lock was slipped inside of us. I say us, but mean me, I think. As tumblers fell into place, we moved around the room, bumping into shelves, tossing lamps and books and hampers of clothing as we struggled to remove our own; all orderly things thrown up and down and away. Sometime later in the quiet moments that followed, I looked away from her and saw a wash of chaos ebb across what had before been clean, open space.

                                                       ---

It was five days before I knew she was gone. I wandered all our old places; the park, the market, even sat at King Billy’s watching my vanilla and hot fudge melt for over an hour. I went to the library and wandered the stack waiting for books to call to me, like they used to. They didn’t. I began selecting spines at random, flipping through them, waiting for notes to fall like angels. Before I realized, I was flipping faster. Then I was ripping books off the shelves, bending pages flipping too fast, throwing them over my shoulders as I finished not stopping until a hand on my shoulder led to hard eyes and a grimace.

On the walk home, I scanned the sky for the yellow bird she always spoke of, hoping that if she had deserted me, she had at least left a friend. But the sky was blue and clear, devoid of any indication as to the future. Fuckstain noticed my mood, from blank to black, and kept his wisdom to himself. A small smirk of pride came over me when I caught him looking at me for the first time with a touch of fear.

And before I knew it, it was every other Wednesday.

“What’s wrong, son?” My mother had made chicken almandine, my favorite. But all I wanted was a pomegranate sliced with a small, silver blade. I wanted her thumbs on my shoulders, her breath in my ear. I wanted the freedom and flying that filled my mind when she spoke about spiders, or goldfishes, or gothic rainbows.

“I’m…lost,” I said. My mother’s eyes lit up at my words for the first time in many years. “Yes?” she said, not quite a vulture, but something close, smelling opportunity in the air of my admission. “Go to college. You’ll find yourself there. I did.” She took a sip from her white, and added, “I found your father.”

My laughter filled the same rafters my father’s laughter had filled, long and hearty, echoing over and over through the emptiness of culture and wealth. It was probably still echoing when the door clicked shut behind me, leaving my mother alone at a table for ten.

                                                     ---

I filled in the last of the information, signed and dated, my future. The end of the great sloth inside me. The clothes and books still littered my floor, and if I tried, I could still smell her in my bed. As I sealed the envelope, I sighed. This was what my muse had given me? The ability to frighten my roommate, laugh at my mother, and seal an envelope. Something heavy sat on my chest, even as I walked down to the shared mail center of our apartment building. A man in an officially blue uniform stood by the metal holes, shuffling mail. As I reached for mine, so did he. “Oh, excuse me,” he said, his eyes glittering strangely. “Are you Kehl Renner-Housman?” My stomach turned, but I laughed a little. “I used to be.” To my surprise, the postal worker smiled and said, “Yeah, I know that feeling. Very well, I’m afraid.” Winking, he reached into the mail cart behind him and produced a box, nine inches on a side and covered with drawings. Without a word, he turned back to his duties. As soon as I saw the postmark, I ran upstairs and into my room, causing Fuckstain to flinch as I bolted past him and slammed my door.

The box was covered with drawings made with a ball point pen, one of the cheap ones you accidentally swipe from the bank. It showed things I didn’t understand at first; faces, storefronts, strange shapes that I would later discover were impression of Indian food and the jewelry contained in Alsana’s Grand Sahri Imporium. Inside, the box was a seemingly random assortment of objects, and a handwritten note. A pair of small black, fingerless gloves; worn and smelling of pomegranate body spray. A ceramic cow with a racing number on the side of it. A pair of hot pink shoelaces. A brand new copy of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, with fresh notations, questions, on every page. An older looking cellular telephone, with charger. And at the very bottom, a paper produce bag. In swirling letters, the bag showed the name of the store “Mercado” and inside I found a pomegranate. As I lifted the pomegranate, I also discovered muse’s butterfly knife at the bottom of the bag. I read the note last. It was one line in muse’s lazy scrawl: True Love isn’t allowed, Sam. Isn’t my business, they said. Make a loud memory for me, though.

                                                      ---

Later, sitting on our bench in the park, I ate the pomegranate slowly, chucking the seeds into the grass, just as she had for the yellow bird, saving a few for myself. As I slid her little knife through the fruit’s flesh, I glanced occasionally over at the bench beside me. In the blank space muse should’ve been occupying sat a sealed envelope addressed to Winstead College. Next it, the produce bag from Mercado. Upon further examination, I had found an address on the underside of the bag’s bottom: 312 47th Street, New York, New York.

I got home just before dark, and Fuckstain was nowhere to be found. The house was silent, waiting, expecting. I went into my room, and placed all of muse’s things in her box. Lifting a bag from my closet, I placed three books, a toothbrush, an envelope of cash, and a change of clothes inside it. As I stood in the middle of my room, holding muse’s box, I felt suddenly compelled to douse my room with lighter fluid and toss a match. But I did not. Fire was not the answer to my question. The answer to my question was sitting in a trash bin near the fountain where muse had first baptized me into her religion. There, among the remains of a pomegranate rind was a crumpled envelope addressed to Winstead College. Somewhere high overhead in the night sky, I hoped the yellow bird was watching as I wandered the streets, waiting impatiently for an eight o’clock train bound for New York. I flipped open muse’s copy of 451, and began answering all the questions written in the margins, aloud, not the least concerned at the man staring across the way.