Bruce Taylor, Neither Here Nor There (story)

But the closer they get to home, the more the music on the car radio slows to nothing but sobs, under skies neither of them mentions going more thickly clouded, growing colder the further north they go. No Saturday morning cartoons and cinnamon toast, a skinny little paper and the usual chores. No bills due, no cat food to lug in the front door, no litter out the back. No lessons the children must be driven to. No naps. Her on her smoking porch, her husband and son sleeping safely above. Him 11 miles away drunk again in his dark kitchen, the radio barely on and tuned to somewhere far off. She would often on a Friday evening go to bed after the dishes and sleep for fourteen hours. One rainy Sunday afternoon he sat waiting for his wife and kids in the K-Mart parking lot and wept uncontrollably to Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.” So they may have held hands in a parking lot or two, walked arm in arm down the sunset trail to the riverbank, him saying "I'd like to see you in a slip of that color." So they fucked like rats in a wool sock every chance they got, balled once in the big windowed deserted penthouse ballroom of a Vegas casino with a neon sandstorm swirling four floors beneath them. So they had a repertoire of three dozen gestures meaning everything from ` like pigs rolling in Oreos' to `the genie is somewhat out of the bottle' that only a pitcher and a catcher could read. So when one of them said, ‘I’ll meet you by the bald guy” the other knew not just exactly where that was but when. No overdue oil change, no fetid gutters nor fast food drive through lunches yelled hoarsely into some clown's mouth, no garden to weed or loll in no sidewalks to be shoveled or swept. No Time or Life to try to catch up on. Story is she spends the weekend "scrubbing and fucking,” him brooding and drunk in the garage. She rents videos he suggests the ones she thinks her husband might enjoy. He sends e mails she cannot read until Monday and thinks he lets the wife beat him at cribbage. Mostly it was whatever guts of the day they could offer up unto each other they did, crumbs of time they used to think of as for themselves and now they were -- coffee-breaks, the long lunches on what they were not hungry for, any night they could get out to the bar, the rare out of town conference -- real or imagined -- they could parlay into a road trip. Fridays, though, were sacrosanct, just to get through the weekend apart their time together required. Two hours, once in awhile three. Afterwards, they are too used to it all to weep anymore in a parking lot at such a usual thing as parting, birds coming or going, all the trees putting off or on their leaves. There’s the usual pre Weekend errands, he gets Kitty Litter and Light Bulbs, she Salmon and trash bags. What they are expected to bring home and what they do. Then there's the left turn and the right, the predictable nature of the antipodal, the Spring to the Fall of it all while the lights in every direction, at every intersection blink their easy advice -- to stop or go or to proceed with caution.