“Exhausted.” She had asked him how he felt and he briefly debated lying, but he wanted to get off on the right foot. She had let him pick the restaurant and he paid her back with honesty. “It’s just work,” he said, as if that explained it, but it wasn’t just work. It was his ex-wife, and his kids, and his health, and his hair, and his car, and even smaller things, like the fact that he couldn’t find his copy of Your Arsenal, and streaming wasn’t good enough, maybe for some people, not for him, it was ownership he desired, but he felt strange about going into a store and buying another copy, mostly because of how Morrissey had turned out. He didn’t go into any of this. He was committed to honesty, but not insanity. The meal was good. The wine, too. She invited him back to her place, and he went, not exactly lustful, more curious to see what would transpire, and what did transpire was what she wanted, evidently, another drink in her kitchen and then lights dimmed so they could move to her couch. A session there, alternately cautious and frantic. They did not make it to the bedroom. That was her intention, as she said more than once, but she sensed that he was flagging and permitted business to finish on the couch. He slept. When he woke, he needed a minute to adjust his eyes. The couch was gone. He felt ground beneath him. The entire apartment, in fact, was gone. He was outside, exposed to a sky that was a gory red. She was gone, too, or at least nowhere in sight. He glanced at his watch; the hands were spinning wildly. Was it a dream? No sooner had he asked himself the question than he knew it was not. He knew, with a plummet of certainty, that he was wide awake, that he had in fact slept for a hundred years, a thousand, more, that the world had ended and he had woken into the aftermath. Lucid, marooned, he stood and glanced at the horizon, where fire licked upward into the sky. “Absurd,” he said out loud. “Ridiculous.” No one was around to hear him. He started to sing “Glamorous Glue” at the top of his lungs.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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