J. Allyn Rosser

First there was Jim, clamping to my long black hair that nine-pound Cleopatra wig with nylon bands and bobbie pins. Meanwhile I was on fire for Chad, who coached me a bit impatiently Tuesday nights on my Joan-of-Arc inflection. Then Terence said I’d be perfect for the lounge-singer- turned-whore, and as it turned out that was a fairly easy gig. Max signed me on soon after, claiming I was a natural for Eternally Aggrieved Girl, which in hindsight hurts me deeply. So by the time you followed me back to the green room to wait in the hallway—whistling!— for my scrubbed face to emerge, naturally I was wary, waiting for the script you never bothered to come up with. It was damned awkward sitting there, nothing but milkshakes between us. Maybe, I thought, you’d assumed I was the one with a script. Finally I decided to give Terence a call. I didn’t like the way you looked at me so steadily with your chin resting on one fist, as if the table were a table, the boards A floor. Listening there as if you meant it, as if something I could say were true, and every moment from now on would be my cue.

When the fog slunk in with that salivary, close, coyote panting, its hue a very huelessness, like breath huffed on a glass, like the void stretched and still stretching past where we’d thought it could, we felt less wary. We felt our shoulders loosen, surrendering to phantom hands and softly vanished feet. The sensation was a first and last: sweet to feel the vigilance at last suspending, the chronic stress of constantly pretending to know—have known!—what all the others knew. Loopy, sly, we leered at one another (what we just assumed was one another) and did the things we weren’t supposed to do, grinning as if seated in the back pew of a church that worshipped fuss and bother, a dour church where facial expression of any kind had been prohibited, and where the chinking, hefty plate we shifted hand to hand held such a vast collection of their coin, we pocketed a fraction for when the fog would lift, if it lifted. But stealing from them puts you in their power. Since then we have been paying for that hour.

They come down to us rounding the corners of centuries at an innocent jog, shedding letters and most of the grand old meanings to take on the sleek new hide our day demands, a snappier nap that can repel the stare of a rather less tactful sun; they come down to us com- pounding, bounding in idiot joy, they come with that trustful tired old mutt look, that soft woof, warm doggie sigh on the knee, hoping for what? Some reason, no doubt, to continue sounding. Give me one good reason, they come down to us saying, as if we could have one without them.

How do you explain why elephants appear to move their unwieldy hulks with greater dignity than most humans do in their finest moments, as if they had evolved beyond wanting anything but what they have? Why does the field begin to ripple before the wind arrives in whispers, as if there were a communication, as if the landscape were poorly dubbed, and we weren’t expected to notice? What butterfly does not dart away from us as if it could sense our latent cruelties, and yet return to check and double-check? Has the night not gotten recently darker, as if to insinuate that we have squandered the light that was there? Have we made too much of our own? And did you notice afterward the dawn opening up with a tentative eagerness as if there were something crucial to illumine, as if we would wake up early just to see it? I imagine you reading this now with an expression of quiet trouble itself troubled by currents of hope, as if you imagined me here with you, as if I might be able to see your expression, and at least answer it with mine.