Snowed In
Gary Percesepe
Atlantic City, January 4. Their tenth wedding anniversary. The children are with her mother in Trenton. Rain lashes the windows, turns to snow, then back to rain. It is two o’clock in the morning. Doctors from the convention stumble into elevators. One tries their door with a keycard, curses his mistake, shuffles off down the hall.
Our lives were built on false information, Tyrone tells Anna, but that doesn’t mean tonight can’t be different?
They have argued. They are the couple that bickers at weddings.
Outside, rain sifts through parking lot trees. Smashed perfection, Anna says. Though we started well. Our first year we didn’t ever fight.
He considers this. Maybe we should have fought, he says. His voice bleeds into the upper register. People fight when they have complete relationships. You know? Not based on fantasy.
I’m tired of fighting, she says. You’re one to talk, about fantasies.
I gave her up, Tyrone pleads.
You said that, Anna says.
But it’s true. I only held her once and it probably doesn’t count. I never kissed her. Didn’t even try. We were walking to the 14th Street station after dinner and I grabbed her waist and pulled her to my side in a guy’s half hug, OK? And she kind of hung there at my hip, for two beats. Then we released and we were at the station and I tried to convince her but she said she couldn’t, ever. She walked down the stairs to the subway and I called her name and she turned back around and looked but I couldn’t, either.
Is this supposed to make me feel better?
Tyrone sighs and goes to the window. It has turned to snow again. Weathermen are calling for a blizzard to hit. If it does they will be snowed in. They have two more nights at the conference. He looks over his shoulder and shudders. Wind escapes the night and passes through the double-paned hotel window. They are a short distance from the white-capped ocean. He draws the curtain. It is a furious season. Already, a continent away in Malibu, red-tiled mansions slide toward the sea, carried by rivers of mud. Her body is tiny in the big bed. She looks like a small enemy.
I don’t know what it is supposed to make you feel. But it’s the truth.
The truth, she snorts. Yes. Well. She turns her back to him but continues to speak.
There are always more worlds to travel. And this is not about your silly girl. But when it becomes time to go neither of us will leave before the other. And that’s because of the first year.
Tyrone lies beside her reading Tolstoy, in trouble again with the church despite being dead a hundred years. Anna’s back curves like the half moon of winter. Tyrone watches with stupid tears as she places her clear fingernails lightly beneath his ache, as if she were touching an altar of driftwood.
Her mouth opens to him, their love a pier extending far out into the swollen surf.
_______________
Gary Percesepe is Associate Editor at BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review), and a Contributor at The Nervous Breakdown. His short stories, poems, essays, reviews, and interviews have been widely published or are forthcoming in Story Quarterly, N + 1, Salon, Mississippi Review, Antioch Review, Pirene’s Fountain, The Millions, Atticus Review, Houston Literary Review, Westchester Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Rumpus, Pank, Bluestem, Bull, Word Riot, Moon Milk Review, Fogged Clarity, Necessary Fiction, Negative Suck, The Brooklyner, and other places. He is the author of four books in philosophy and an epistolary novel with Susan Tepper, What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G, (Cervana Barva Press). He recently completed his second novel, Leaving Telluride, set in Telluride, Colorado.