Southbound, Yonge and College
Caucasian male, late 20s, with long dark hair, wearing plain white T-shirt, brown cargo shorts, and black pool slide sandals.
Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories , Jerome H. Stern, Ed. (W. W. Norton & Company)
“The Poet’s Husband” by Molly Giles
He sits in the front row, large, a large man with large hands and large ears, dry lips, fresh-cut hair, pink skin, clear eyes that don’t blink, a nice man, calm, that’s the impression he gives, a quiet man who knows how to listen; he is listening now as she sways on the stage in a short black dress and reads one poem about the time she slit her wrists and another poem about a man she still sees and a third poem about a cruel thing he himself said to her six years ago that she never forgot and never understood, and he knows that when she is finished everyone will clap and a few, mostly women, will come up and kiss her, and she will drink far too much wine, far too quickly, and all the way home she will ask, “What did you think, what did you really think?” and he will say, “I think it went very well” — which is, in fact, what he does think — but later that night, when she is asleep, he will lie in their bed and stare at the moon through a spot on the glass that she missed.
They’ve been dating for over a year now, on and off, mostly off, especially if you count the six weeks she travelled abroad, which he does, and they agreed they shouldn’t be exclusive not knowing if, or when, they’d take the next step, the next step itself unclear, and even more so because he did stay exclusive, while she didn’t, which isn’t really even the reason he started to let himself think about this again, it’s his writing, and her back yard, which is large, and tree-covered, and has that little shed that she once suggested way-back-when he could turn into a studio, if they took the next step, but she was at a reading with her friends, and the beer was free, and he didn’t know her well enough yet to know if he should believe her, or if he even wanted to look far enough into a future in which he didn’t have another girlfriend, or was the guy who didn’t fool around in those six weeks, just the guy who wonders what kind of guy he is that he will miss that shed more than her now that he’s finally decided.
