End of December

So that's the thing. You can pace around and still type. Can't speak for fear of troubling the neighbors, should close the window blinds too so that I do not offend their vision.

Months and months now he has been singing to me, most every day. Even going on for hours; it's like he never runs out of words, never shuts up. Celebrants of the approaching new year clog the streets at night. They revel and wander, stopping often to eat and drink. From my shadowed balcony of some evenings I stare at the voids between their whirling electrons. All the empty space is ringing in my ears for month after month. Quieter some days, lonely and lonelier on others, but you can hear it all in there. Or out there; can phrase it in a number of ways. Do you find yourself favoring one version over another? Is there anything I can do to make your stay here more comfortable? All he wants me to do is please you and gain a fraction of your approving attentions. He's got so many words; it's like he never shuts up but never says a word of substance.

You can sit on the edge of your bed,look at the pattern of the sheet, keep your neck craned and your shoulders stooped. Posturing defeats, assumptive submission, beggars with wooden legs leaned on the wall beside them. Sun shining down for hours and hours, month after month, bleaching and scoring the dust kicked up by sandals and slippers.

This morning when I rose I greeted him for the first time. He did not stop his chanting, those words I could not even understand. He nodded slightly. Only the shifting of the sun's glint in his deepset eye showing the gesture. I could not tell if he responded in his continuous song. The words meant nothing like that to me. I could hear wind whispering through wrinkled groove of his cheekbone, the dry protrusions eroding and suddenly collapsing.

My schedule for that particular day, whichever it was, was predetermined: pursuits all trained and tending in the same direction. That may be within or upward, however you like, but was without a doubt a move from the blue to the black. I was humming a tune about the fish that swim those dark oceans between the stars; we call ourselves lucky if we sight their luminous flukes. I have seen one, low in the sky near horizon. I watched one night as it rose on front of the great tail, hoarding my attention, breaking the link I was forging.

I was shocked when I arrived at the greenhouse. To the right, along the panels of North's east wall, the pipes had cracked. Water rested in small pools on the cement floor. Pirate plants and thimbleweed hung their leaves weakly, shading in their decreption. The overnight engineer had not noticed. Or had and ignored it. Other people do that sometimes. No, he had shut the valve if nothing else. The cracked pipes were still and dry.