Cracks

There is still sand from her zen garden scattered everywhere and particularly in the various cracks and crazing on the surface of my weathered desk where I used to sit and stare out the window, as though at the prow of some imaginary ship, drifting in words and ideas, laptops, coffee cups and toxic inspirations tucked and teetering, in all available corners. But for the past year, this desk has been blissfully empty, save for the aforementioned zen garden with its quaint miniature rake and its omniscient goddess, clad in a bathrobe with her green tea and her oatmeal peel, singing the praises of simplicity and good riddance to the clutter and mess which preceded it. My clutter and mess, my work, my misgivings and missed opportunities.

”Why are you wasting so much time,” she would say, “writing nonsense that no one will ever see?”

“It’s my time to waste I suppose,” I replied.

”No, honey, it’s OUR time. It would be different if you actually did something instead of just drinking and smoking and dreaming and sitting there all day staring out the window and thinking of god knows what.”

She wasn’t wrong. And she was a monster in bed - in bed, in the kitchen , on the couch, in the bathroom - I looked around the apartment and saw the many splendid ghosts of our lust, and for a moment I was sad again and horny again and angry and hungry, but as I swept still more sand from my desk, poured myself a midday whisky and dragged my battered chair from the closet where it had remained for a year, stacked high with all my many vices, I was suddenly inexplicably happy.

“Now what would happen,” I wondered out loud, “if a vegan became a werewolf?”