FUGUE # 5, Spring/Summer 1992
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let himself picture them.) Once he heard her say "I love you" to him over the extension phone. He tried to pretend he was on the other end. The glass of wine slipped from his hand, and he watched it spread, red across the flowered time. "Blossom where you're planted." He moved back to the living room, slid the doors open, and exited. The air was damp and smelled of dirt. Erin had been planting flowers the day before. He stood for minutes and tried to breathe, tried to remember how it had once been, how once upon a time she had made Russian teacakes and had turned to him wit h flour on her nose and throat, laughing at one of his jokes, how once upon a time .... It began to rain. Then, slowly, Sam knelt down, hi s legs sore from his morning run, the miles he used to forget, and he reached out to touch one of the new flowers, but as soon as he felt the wet leaves he began to tear out the bedding plants. "I wonder, by my troth," six begonias ... "What thou and I did, till we loved?" four blue lobelia ... "We're not weaned till then?" two chrysanthemums, large and bitter ... "If ever any beauty I did see, which I desired and got, 'twas but a dream of thee." His voice dropped to a whisper. In one, mad sweep, he ripped out an entire wall of pink geraniums and white petunias, the smell almost overwhelming him. "And now good morrow to our waking souls, which watch not one another out of fear; For love, all love of other sights controls and makes one little room, an everywhere." All that remained was the red rose bush, an anniversary gift to her last year. David and Sara had been there celebrating with them. They
all drank red wine and toasted the day. He leaned over it slowly, methodically. "My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears." The words began to choke in his dry throat. In two more hours she would gaze into those brown eyes of her lover, dancing another Tarantella. "And true plain hearts do in the faces rest; where can we find two better hemispheres ... " He refused himself the comfort of gloves. He pulled straight up, the thorns tearing his right palm, the blood redder than the cabernet. "Without sharp north, without declining west?" He tore the rose, up and out, flung it to the side of the dark apartment, and wiped the blood on his jeans. "Whatever dies was not mixed equally...." Tears spilled onto his cold cheeks as he began to run down the hill, across the bridge, and toward the university. He could see the lights twinkling in the rain, could feel his heart pounding. That winter it rained 120 days straight. m
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