Quick Brown Fox 2013

her but it wasn’t the same.”

They are quiet. She wonders how you try to love someone, how you even begin to force yourself to long for someone else’s scent or feel tenderness when their arms are around you. He says, “Now you tell me something.”

“I am afraid my mother will die alone of sadness in her bed,” Leela offers. “And I don’t know my sister anymore, because she moved to California to get away from us.” Leela thinks of the stacks of newspaper-wrapped gold jewelry in her drawer, how she will never wear any of it but somehow its presence in the room where she sleeps is a comforting thing. She imagines her mother looking beautiful in all that gold, and young again, and natural, and maybe happy.

He says, “I thought if I dropped everything and went on a grand adventure, I wouldn’t feel restless anymore.”

She says, “Sometimes when I am out in the open, walking down the street, I feel as confined and desperate as if I were trapped in an elevator.”

He says, “I’m here in New York because my brother has cancer.”

They are quiet on the carpet for a long time, a slice of moonlight illuminating the floor. Leela thinks of her grandmother, how she was married at seventeen with a crown of jasmine in her hair, how life slipped away from her in the middle of the night and she did not feel a thing, and if Adam’s brother were to die it would probably be very different, in a fluorescent lit room in a hospital bed, with ominous machines beeping all around. She reaches for Adam’s body, hooks her index finger onto his. He is silent but does not pull away. Leela looks at his form in the dark, breathing delicately, and she thinks of how Adam once made her feel new, and that even if all they are ever going to have are those years behind them and this one day, his chapter in her life is one she will remember with fondness. She feels, for a moment, unbelievably young.

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