Member-only story
Unrequited
Airplane bottles and a busted gramophone. The most uncomfortable seat by the shore on cracked concrete blocks. No pictures, please. A chunk of obsidian for your barest gesture. A rope swing to hang your novelties from. I should’ve told you that you’re a jerk a long time ago, now. I should’ve murmured to you that I’m trying to break my own heart. But instead I was taming imaginary lions with barstools. Instead I was just drop-dead ordinary, listening to you sigh, “Nights like these, they just never last.” So, Dr. Seuss was your illegitimate uncle, and I was too busy balancing dollar bills on my head to notice the bored suggestions in your wandering lilt. Besides, I’ve always been jealous of people who can lounge leisurely, lunge leisurely, run with ice cream cones — do anything without having to worry about it so much. All the way from Kalamazoo to discuss the busted guts of life’s least mysterious beverages and your own funeral plans in a scruffy cordovan booth. Then you had to go, and I had to go a bit crazy about it. The accordion music plays The Fifth, and of course I’m left with Elvis’s messed-up hair and Charles McGraw’s gruff voice, my back pocket all full of tobacco and stardust and never-left tips. I guess there are just too many ways to not like someone, and not enough to be liked back. Don’t get any ideas. Let’s rake this in fast. Fall’s on the move again, threading its lonesome and mushy way through the eaves and sidewalk trees, and all…
