Wings (Patientia)
This post is Copyright 2007 Jeremy Osborne, All Rights Reserved.
I looked across my kitchen table at her, numb to everything that I once believed, ignoring all common sense informing me about what has been happening for the last half-hour. Sharee sat directly across from me holding my white ceramic senchawan inches away from her lips. Her shaking fingers must be churning the milky mixture into a froth. I never thought that she drank anything but the straight stuff in the first place.
Sharee grasps her other hand around the ceramic bowl, minimizing her shakes enough to take a small sip. “The tea,” she says, “It’s cold.”
“And that surprises you?” I ask. “Do you want another blanket?”
“Three is enough,” Sharee says, but I don’t believe her purple lips or her blue finger tips. “Thanks,” she adds after another sip.
I push my chair back and tell her, “I’m going to turn up the thermostat.” Her black eyes widen. “It’s just across the hall.” The dark pools of her eyes shimmer a bit. “I promise I’ll be right back,” I say and stand up, turning my back to her, a definite no-no, if I were following the book of procedures prescribed for this situation. But what am I supposed to do, huh God? What the hell am I supposed to do with a situation like this?
Handful of steps and the green lit LCD of the thermostat informs me that the current ambient temperature inside of my apartment is 79o F; the flashing numbers tell me the temperature is rising. Pressing the button inked with an upward arrow a few times changes the new maximum temperature to 86o F. Good thing mom and dad raised me in the land of mosquitoes and humidity. It also helped that the cloth of my pajamas measured hardly a millimeter thick.
“I’m not used to trusting anyone anymore,” Sharee says as I return to the kitchen. Her tea cup sits on the table and everything but her face, and her horns, burrows away beneath the blanket. “I figured I could take a chance with you.”
My stomach hurts despite my mental objections against it hurting. Before I take a seat at the table, I decide it is time to drink my third bottled water. All this heat relieves me of the problem I have with my usually small bladder. Might as well just open the bottle, let the liquid inside evaporate and cut out the middle man.
I fully expect Sharee to tell me to shut the refrigerator door the moment after I crack open the rubber seal, but she doesn’t. Standing there in front of my only Maytag appliance, sweating in my own apartment, staring into a bright white light, trying to comfort the woman sitting at my table… but she’s not a woman anymore, I remind myself. I take the bottle of water back to the table and sit in my chair.
“Will you forgive me?” she says.
“I can’t forgive you,” I say. God left you long ago, I hear myself reflexively say and cringe at how horrible that sounds. I cringe at how many times I’ve said that myself to people who just needed love. You’re why I left my job years ago.
And she cries. A single tear runs over her eyelashes and trails down her left cheek. Another tear escapes her eye and drips onto the table, the first drop preceding a storm. She speaks not a word or sound. Her pupils pantomime the pain of every atrocity committed against each and every living being, and I want to cry with her, but I don’t feel anything but dull pain in my belly.
I push my chair back on my way to pace around the kitchen and before I can escape she grasps my forearm in her exceedingly warm hand and utters the word, “Please.” I pull away and begin my endless march around the butcher block in the center of my kitchen.
“Do you have any idea what you have done to me?” I say.
Silence, the correct answer to a rhetorical question, and the one that annoys me the most. I take one more lap around my tiny isle of chefdom and head back to the refrigerator. Yanking open the door causes exactly what I want to spill on the floor: a small plastic container of partially eaten homemade coffee flavored ice cream labeled You Have Better Things to Do. I scoop it off the floor, slam the freezer door shut and grab two dessert spoons on the way back to the table, tossing one in front of Sharee. The spoon clatters against the tea bowl and stops. The now open container of ice cream sweats and drips all over the table, the cafe colored inside liquifying in the heat.
“Want a bite?” I ask Sharee as I hold one of my few pleasures remaining on this planet out to her. She looks straight at me and I soften. “I’m not making fun of you, it’s a real question.”
Sharee smiles for the first time, just a bit, and says, “Yes.” She picks up the metal spoon (made sure to keep the flimsy plastic ones in a cooler place) and scoops out no more than a thimbleful of the frozen treat. It melts into warm flavored milk on the trip from container to lips. Her lips close around the spoon just a moment before her eyes widen and she slams the spoon onto the table. “Ouch!” she grimaces and grips the side of her head. “Oh my head. Brainfreeze!” She rubs her temples with both of her hands, just below her horns, for almost a minute before looking up with a bright smile. “Thanks.”
I look at her, stare at her, at her face, at her huddled up in her chair like a little kid. My stomach hurts and it isn’t from the lactose, but I want it to be, but it isn’t and I know it, so I put down the ice cream and stare at the soupy mess it transforms into. “Before I went outside, I called the cops. They’re on their way.” And I haven’t called them off, I think, and then I say it aloud. “And I haven’t called them off.”
“You shouldn’t,” she says.
This pisses me off and I say “What do you mean I shouldn’t? Are you crazy? How dare you come back here? Don’t you know how much pain you’ve caused me? And you show up at my door and make me intervene?”
“I’m sorry,” Sharee says.
“Why do you keep being so nice? What the hell happened to you anyway?” I cross my arms over my midsection. The sweat on my skin is making it difficult to assume an angry pose, and that upsets me even more. I want to scream.
Sharee uncurls her smile and holds her lips neutral. Silence again for minutes and I start to wonder where the cops are, and then remember the side of town I’m now spending my life in. My mind grasps for anything, and bumps against a thought so simple I can’t escape it. I prop my elbows on the table in front of my, in front of her, and rest my head in my hands.
“You know I left the church after you left me,” I tell Sharee the keystone of my problems, this one thing that everyone knew about me already, except maybe for me. “I left the church after you–” I start sobbing into my tightened fists, the pain in my stomach pushing itself out through my eyes and nose. I dig my fingers into my scalp, giving me something real to cry over, but it’s not enough.
“I have missed you so much Sharee,” I confess, admitting it out loud for the first time. “I tried to carry on but I couldn’t, I refused to. I refused to believe in that… that crap.”
I hear Sharee say, “I love you. I think it’s the one thing that gave me a chance.” I start laughing at the absurdity of that comment, the absurdity of what she just said, the proof in front of me that went against everything I had learned. I wipe my eyes and see Sharee’s facial expression ask me Why are you laughing?
Before I can explain, a rap on the front door silences me. I had completely forgotten about my previously made hysterical 911 call. Emergency services obviously hadn’t. From the pit of my stomach I feel a moment of tired hatred for what used to be a woman that I now look at, for the person who put me in this embarrassing situation in my life. I stand up to open the door, to get this over and send things back to the way they used to be, and then sit back down again.
“For some reason I think what I’m about to do would make Mother Theresa proud,” I say, looking at the horns on Sharee’s head. “Will you forgive me?”
Giant tear drops rain down from Sharee’s cheeks onto the table top. “Yes,” she says.
Words never meant much to me until that moment. “Thank you,” I say. “I forgive you, too.” I grasp her hands in mine, still feverishly hot, but that doesn’t matter anymore. I leave Sharee for just a moment and open the front door to my apartment to do what I know is right.