Tuesdays

Today is a Tuesday, one of many. He has a girl he loves every Tuesday, her day off. He burns at the fine fire of her conscience, tells her they’ll be married someday. He has a wife, Doreen, a freckle-faced fat thing who harbors resentment that during her Tuesday at her mother’s, he insists on going to the movies. Rose petals he picks up in the neighbor’s yard end up at Tuesday’s feet and sprinkled through the sheets. Of course they must make love, since he sees her only once a week. Doreen requires sex after seeing her mother. He feels like an ox on Tuesday, powerful and massive. He tells this to Tuesday and to Doreen. Doreen tells him he is an ox a brute master of the air and his rightful bed. But Tuesday, who knows oxen are slow moving, dim witted, and castrated at birth, follows him home instead of playing her dulcimer, climbs the wall, watches him mounting his wife, leaves rose petals on his doorstep, takes the train to cornfields, steers and heifers watches the city disappear in rain. Thinks briefly of how tenderly he rose in her fingers while the remains of their breakfast, eggs and potatoes cooled on the wooden table with the tattered tablecloth.