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The Indian Giver
[This issue is not continued from last week. Babe Ruth's Piano will be back next week.]
"Where's my beer?" He entered the room, shirtless. It was a sultry New Orleans night. The kind you imagined, if you didn't live there, that you would need a beer on.
If you did live there you actually knew that you damn well did need a beer. And when yours was missing, well, you acquired a certain sense of urgency about the whole damn thing.
You started saying 'damn' a lot.
"I, ehm, decided I wanted it, after all." She went back to reading her magazine. Well, she'd never really left reading it. She just stopped talking while reading her magazine. The pages seemed to wilt against her fingers in the humidity. She pried each page backwards as if peeling an onion. A very wet onion.
He looked at the armrest beside her. Sure enough, there was an empty beer bottle.
Sam Adams, Winter Lager. They'd picked up the case at the store earlier, before the heat settled in for the evening. A lot of people down at the store were talking with the cashier about that; the heat. The cashier looked bored out of his mind, like if he had to reply, "Yes, and the humidity, too, the humidity will sneak up on you until it's sittin' all over your face," like the manager had told him, 'to add local charm, a little local colour' it was. He had held back from mentioning it, because he saw the look on the poor kid's face, and if he heard from one more person about the damn humidity this summer he was going to brain somebody. The heat was just as damn bad. It didn't make anyone feel any better to realise that the humidity was just as bad if not worse – you were hot, friggin' hot, and you felt like if you moved your face would just slide right off you, it was so slicked down and heated up by the combination of heat, humidity, and all that.
The beer was somewhat... well, it had been at the store for a long time, but that was all that was left, and in the winter it was a nice cool beer.
"Hadn't you given that to me, earlier?" He didn't want to stand there, where she could gawk at him, if she weren't so engrossed in her magazine, but he felt he couldn't sit down without that beer he had envisioned a few minutes earlier, when he'd gotten up to go and try to dig out an old fan they had broken the last summer. So he stood, feeling vaguely self-conscious. And oddly objectified, even though no one was watching him. A quick glance at the window verified that the blinds were pulled, and indeed no one was watching him.
"Yes. Sorry. Got thirsty." She remained reading. Another page flopped over.
"Humph." He didn't quite so much say that as shake that out of his shoulders.
She looked up. "Did you get the fan fixed?" This time she didn't go back to her magazine. He noticed there weren't even any moisture drops left over on the bottle. It just sat there on the armrest, barren like a desert. A smooth, brown, glassy desert.
"No." He reached over, as now he was being stared at, and grabbed the bottle off the armrest, and took his own bottle, from earlier, which hadn't been promised to him but then it needn't have been, as it was the one he took out for himself. One for him, one for her.
One for her which she, originally, hadn't wanted to finish. Damn it.
disclaimer:
Hope you had a Happy Valentine's Day, all you folks out there.
For those of you who didn't, well, you've got another year to sort things out so they don't go so poorly next year. No pressure.
This hotted up, out-of-season issue is for all the people sitting in New England, pissed off about stupid baseball millionaires, and waiting for spring and Pedro and Schilling and Derek Lowe and Tim to silence those damn Yankee bats.
Stupid move, Alex.
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