Only Morons Read Hemingway

My bell was rung like I’d just gut suckered by a sledgehammer highball, and all the nurses were on vacation, and there really is no simple way to ask questions you don’t want to hear the answers to, but the streets were slick and smooth, and the rain hadn’t happened yet, and the sun wasn’t partaking in the occasion. Sometimes the rolling, verdurous hills run away with the elephants. And sometimes, well, sometimes, like when the streets are slick and smooth, and the greatest girl in all of Tuscaloosa has just left her teeth marks in your earlobe, you have got to know when to cut your losses and head for those rolling, verdurous hills before they get going without you.

“You once told me you about the airplane sound in your daydreams. We do not have solid footing…anymore.”

“Right. The pressure’s on.”

“Beside the point.”

She talked to me with caresses in her eyebrows. There were tiny snake lines in her forehead, and we’d always danced it all off with a laugh when the waiters came around. Borrowed laughs, they were. Time flew. We had choppier waters to negotiate through then. The tumbling whitewater came and went. Now we had less than each other of ourselves to face it with. Now the grim returns were slimmer too.

“Get it by the gallon,” she said. “The thoroughbred in us takes the pie and drinks minute…