"No I'm expecting someone."
The third solid week of winter rain had soaked Cecilia to the seal. Even just stepping out left her with a damp, broth-y aura clinging to her body. She felt like so much beef bones.
"Here -- let me just...wipe this down here. We're pretty full today. A lot of funerals.
"When the weather gets like this people just start feeling like having a funeral." Cecelia removed her pea-coat and tugged a strand of hair back from her eyelid. In the restaurant's murder light her eyes looked amber-colored. She was wearing yesterday's mascara.
"I'll be right back." He stepped off, visibly relieved. She pulled out a private smirk.
God these places made her sick. It was getting to be that she couldn't hardly go anywhere. Some kid's high, whining voice pricked at her skin. Jesus, Jesus. Dumb middle-class bitches who bought their hair at a carpet store were looking over here --
(no they're not they're looking in the direction of the child's voice; long after they had dwindled like the fading bloom of the rose, still they look. Imagine! The cutting Glave of instantaneous, mitochondrial terror. A fear that can appear any place -- an inundation of pre-fab dread. Fuck, fuck)
--she turned away the windshield frame of the booth's window. Her wan reflection regarded her with envious eyes. She turned back away and flipped up her phone. 7:30. Late.
"Goddamn, there you are! I thought we were meeting earlier..."
"We were meeting earlier. Don't you check mail?"
"Don't even turn the fucking thing on anymore."
"Missing out. Flash had made some real strides."
"Fuck off I'm credentialed like a motherfucker. Have you been...tweezing?"
Cecilia blinked. Once. "No."
"Oh no come on let me see..."
"I wouldn't have to do things like this if you weren't such a goddamn liar!"
"Keep your voice down! This place is lousy with Christians!"
Jenny choked into a giggle. "That's a cunt I know. You bring a gun in your purse so they can shoot themselves after genuflecting before the master rhetorician?"
"...I can't pass the background check." Her mouth capsized into a Charlie Brown W as her head floated down to the table top.
"T'aunt mieux. Pay a policeman buy it for you."
"This is bad. My eyelids feel oily."
"No. Fuck it. We're here."
"You really do look like shit you know."
"You know, I coulda used this time to answer Craigslist fatty ads looking for people to suck their dick while they play American Empire: Shoot the Fucking Deigo's."
"I guess that's a step up."
"Involves reading and everything."
The waiter returned with their coffee.
"Uhhh, two eggs, easy, wheat toast... hash browns."
"English muffin and two links of sausage."
Outside the window, in the gray world, the rain was beginning to freeze.
Waiter, again. "Two eggs, and for you an English muffin. Anything else I can get..."
Cecilia stared down into her plate. The plate regarded her calmly, with the half-lid, narcotized gaze of a foreign god. The glare of the overhead lamps made it unearthly. Its pallor was fast-sinking fashion. God god god god you are stealing my breakfast and my life. You are stealing my oxygen.
Jenny chewed and swallowed. "You gonna call?"
"Why don't I call..." She hiccuped.
Cecilia closed her eyes. Her voice rolled out carefully like a presidential carpet. "I'm not going to call her because I often feel lonely." The row was draped in red.
First thing after getting home Cecilia called in sick to work. The mauve deluge infected her with its stifling kludge -- she was out of sick days, but what, really, did it matter. Being medium-poor was a condition that would survive occupational failure. No one could ever die anymore here. The closest you came was a vicious, grating sense of discomfort. No one could ever, ever die. Late morning, and the light was still dusky and half brimmed.
"I have a mood disorder," Cecilia said to herself. "I'm a joke. I need to do something; I need to be more entertaining." Christ, the wallpaper was waggish like a cutpurse. She walked across the living room, stopped in front of the tv, thought about turning it on. In the regard of its deadened eye she looked plain and washed out. Whatever channel she was on had a low signal. She did not turn the tv on. She backed up and played a smile into her reflection. The house filled in silent spaces with its special coolness, so that every room filled with black, medicine-y Jello. It'll be a while before you see Jenny again, yes.
If Richard had been able to call right at that moment, she would have said something. Instead, she was left standing there staring out into a quickly graying dawn. Fine mist obscured the line of arched roofs drawing off to the horizon. A single sick tree cracked its blackening fingers. Fucked.
(And then she turned back to the coffee machine, removed its basket, discarded wet grounds, replaced its filter, replaced the basket, took the hermetically sealed coffee jar from the cupboard, unsealed the hermetically sealed coffee jar, removed the coffee scoop from the counter-top drawer, scooped coffee from the hermetically sealed coffee jar into the waiting filtered basket, closed the hermetically sealed coffee jar, replaced it in the cupboard, replaced the coffee scoop, closed the coffee maker, turned the coffee maker on)
Her mouth was sick and dry. Outside it looked like the sky could start crying any minute. She could wait it out. From her bedroom the a.m. radio mumbled on; in the ears of a mono speaker Opera Seria was as good as electric static. Her notebook was still seated at the kitchen table from the previous night.
(the coffee maker pumped and gurgled like a broken derrick, like a consumptive cat. Black milk poured down like 40-weight oil -- it required waiting.)
The open page of her notebook read "Still-life with Martyr" and then further down "Angie lost the store-keys." She flipped up her phone to check the time, frowned. She turned over a blank piece of paper and drew a thick circle. In the middle, in careful block print, she wrote: THE VOID. The sighing of trees in the wind rained down like a caul of sickly birds. She tapped her pen in the center of the circle. The coffee-maker played out its last chuckle.
There is a special emptiness that comes from being married to a supernatural being. Sometimes when you walk outside, you can feel its presence in the wind; the trees whisper of a secret love that exists outside of space and time. when you call out its name, it does not answer in any way that a human can understand. At night you sit in the fullness of waiting, candles burning. Sometimes there is a whisper, again, it does not say anything. The whisper is the pressure of its spiritual body entering your pocket of space. You thought that present aloneness could be its own form of reward, that you could wait forever while its empty voice plied keys like a file over dry ice. You thought, "I can wait a little longer." You can wait a little longer.
The storm does not pass as you expected it to -- it rumbles on and on. When the night has finally passed, when it should be growing light out, it is dark. Still you wait in a half sleep. The phone murmurs like a bubbling brook.
"Don't what. What happened?"
"Have you checked around?"
Cecilia looked around the dark bedroom. The fine circle of rice around her bed was slightly misshapen.
"It's harder than it looks!"
"You make it look plenty hard!"
"I think maybe it was here."
"...did you fall asleep again?"
"But you didn't feel it?"
"I don't think it came very close."
"But I think it was here. In the room. I think it worked."
"Well, to be honest, I never thought much would probably come of this."
"You didn't think it would work?"
"Well, it's not like ordering a pizza."
"I'll talk to you later."
Cecilia got up and felt around in the bathtub. Some drops of water were left behind from where it had drawn itself a bath. The towel was still slightly damp as she dried her hands. It looked like it had taken some milk from the refrigerator as well. Fine. Fair enough. It was safe to say the ghost-trap was not working. She got back on the phone.