Quibbling Scribbling

  “Maybe that’s you,” she says. It’s a pleasant thing to hear, lying side-by-side on an old blanket, watching the branches of the old maple fingerpaint the clear sky. I breathe in mothballs and cut grass and her and give her hand a little squeeze. “What’s me?” She doesn’t say anything for a while, and that’s okay. The day is balmy and there’s nowhere to be but here.  “I’m an intense person.” “I figured that out fifteen minutes into our first date when you grabbed my hand and pulled me into the line at The Scullery.” She laughs above the rustling of the tree. “You’re sweet. I used to run marathons, you know?” “I didn’t.” “I can’t describe the relief I’d feel afterward. For a day or two afterward, I’d be tired, just tired, and nothing more. I’d lie on the couch and watch TV with a box of pizza.” “I don’t need to run a marathon to do that.” She swats me on the arm. “Quiet, I’m talking.” I stay silent for a handful of heartbeats and she continues,  “Most people have to find r...

 A man sits alone in a room and scratches his arm. The details of the room are not important to this story, and you may imagine them as you please. Sufficient to say that it was a familiar room to the man, and his presence was nothing but ordinary. The marks on his arm are red and raw. His fine black hairs are stark against the livid flesh. He does not bleed, but the growing trail of petechiae tell that it won’t be long. He does not itch. No itch would compel a man to claw as he does now. Now the inquiring reader asks, “Why?” Perhaps idle curiosity prompts the question. Perhaps nagging impatience. After all, what more can a faceless man in a nondescript room be than a trite morality tale? (For that matter, with all these digressions, what can a story even be other than a self-indulgent commentary? But let’s not lose ourselves here.) So he sits and stares and scratches and what runs through his head as he rakes his nails is not a coherent thought but an awareness of the pain that i...