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By Darren Kaminsky
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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three. The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C. As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.
Click here to start with Chapter One.
Chapter Three
June 6
“You know I didn’t want to go back there,” Dani says, her voice getting louder as she spoke.
“You didn’t say it. All you said was, ‘Why don’t we just go home?’” I answered.
“I know how you are about YOUR friends, what was I going to do? Go home by myself?”
“I wouldn’t have let you do that.”
“I wasn’t going to tempt you.”
“Why would I let you walk home alone?”
“The same fucking reason I sleep in my bed alone 4 nights a week...because you have somewhere better to be.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Fair? You still sleep in Bella’s bed. You do, you asshole, and I STILL sleep with you.”
“Bel and I don’t have sex.”
“And that fucking matters?
“Doesn’t it?”
“No, it doesn’t fucking matter. You care enough about her to want to sleep near her. THAT’S FUCKING WORSE THAN SEX YOU BASTARD.”
“ I just...it’s just...habit.”
“And if you gave a shit, it’s a habit you’d give up. ‘Cause you told me, you fucking promised me, that you’d fucking tell her.”
“I just can’t bring myself. It’ll hurt her too much.”
“Hurt her? HURT HER?”
She picked up the full-length mirror next to her and threw it at me. If time were music then the mirror pivoted through the air in low notes, every tenth of a second ticked by with the beat of the bass drum pounding ache in my head.
I
was riveted. I knew I should’ve moved. I wanted to move, but somehow
I couldn’t.
It hit the coffee table and shattered in blinding light. Bits of mirror
reflecting me and Dani and the light of the room shot off from the wood
like welder’s sparks. Two of them, small jagged bits, embedded themselves
in my arm just deep enough so that I could look down and see reflections
of tiny bits of my own face or thought I could.
“Oh God, I’m sorry,” she said grabbing her mouth with one hand.
I didn’t really know what to say. I was too stunned and there were tiny trickles of blood running down my arm.
She ran to the kitchen and brought back paper towels and pulled the mirrored bits from my arm and wiped the blood away so that it made light purple streaks across my forearm and, while I sat down, pulled band-aids from the bathroom where she must have gone while I wasn’t paying attention since the blood was welling yet again and suddenly I just felt so exhausted and empty that it just didn’t matter.
“You can sleep on the sofa tonight,” she said, getting down on all fours and gathering up bits of mirror. I got down on the floor too and pulled out the little jagged pieces where I could, but there was no way to get them all; they were hidden in the carpet and only by turning on every lamp in the room could we even see enough of them to have accomplished even part of the task.
“No,” I said. “I’m going to go. We need some time apart.”
“Yeah, but where are you going to go this time of night?”
I didn’t answer her. I just started putting my stuff in my small backpack. Most of my stuff was at Bella’s anyway.
“You’re going to go to Bella’s aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
“No, I’m sure she’s asleep and I’m not about to wake her. Maybe I’ll go to Teddy’s. Hell, it’s 4 a.m., maybe I won’t go anywhere and I’ll just walk around ‘til dawn.”
“That’s so dramatic,” she said and rolled her eyes.
“I
guess you’d know all about that,” I replied without even looking
at her, then
I took my backpack and walked out, noticing for the first time that the
Mezzuzah that Dani’s father had drilled into the doorframe was decorated
in shattered bits of mirror.
When I was 13 and a budding atheist, I asked a rabbi why people got married. “Because man is incomplete,” he’d answered. "A woman completes him and what goes on between a man and a woman during sex is what goes on constantly between the male and female aspects of God.”
I wandered around for a while, walking up 17th street, walking down 18th street, but then I walked down one of the spoke-like avenues to Dupont Circle and found one of the park benches not occupied by a cotton-and-newspaper wrapped heap of a bum, sat down and looked up at the cup-shaped fountain with it’s carving of heavy shouldered wind gods straining to propel ships and bearded sea gods looking to spear them and large-breasted, scaly-tailed mermaids ready to lure them onto hidden rocks.
Dawn was breaking over P street and sending streaks of blood colored light high into the sky. I watched until it became fully morning and then went to work unshaven, unslept and hungover. The aftertaste of cheap vodka filmy and sharp in my throat.
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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.
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2004 Me Three