Another sad sack work of fiction, or: We (heart) Carver

And that’s how it ends. We’re posted up on the porch in the dead of night. The fog sits low over town, low enough that the glow of the prison lights are reflected like an amber heaven, and the airport tower slices through at regular intervals, first white, then blue. The night is cold, and the cigarette smoke hangs in the air around us, and his last statement with it. I’m left thinking, this is how it ends.

It was always going to come out this way, with him begrudging me, or maybe me hating him, or both of us turning to other cheeks, other warmth. I’ve been ready for this since the day we met, when I knew, even then, that between the two of us there wasn’t enough warmth to hold up in a frost, let alone a hard freeze. We’re rich in soul, but poor of heart. I think now that I chose him because I knew it wouldn’t end dramatically; I understood that between us it would simply end. It was a nice enough go of it, for all it was. I’m only sorry it’s ending now, just now, when it seems one needs another more than anything else.

The foghorn bleats, keeping time and measuring the distance between breaths. The local stray cats slink by, streaking home to the widow who feeds them. In passing, they incite the neighborhood dogs to barking, and suddenly the stretched silence is filled with an apparent cacophony. Between the horn, the dogs, the barking seals, and the neighbors arguing, the silence seems almost enough to make me sorry over this.

But I won’t be regretful or sad, it’s not in our idiom. “So that’s that,” I manage, my own contribution to the noise and lack thereof. And it is; we loved in our own halfhearted way, each too busy protecting our own to actually reach out and care for the other. It is done, and was done, and will now be gotten beyond. He has finished rolling his cigarette and tucks the package back into his deep pocket, mutters to the affirmative; we have finished the last beers in the case and lay the empties beside their fallen bretheren. And we get up; he steps off the porch and into the mist, and I make sure to lock the door behind me.