Cue Piano Music as Scene Ends

It was in the quiet silence of her departure, the way the door thudded close and the way the car remained glazed by the scent of her that made him pause.

The rain had stopped...and he imagined there may have been a rainbow as the sun piroutted from beneath a cloud and he imagined as well that if there had been some colors in the sky that she might now be looking at them.

He looked directly towards the sun, wishing, faintly and almost laughingly like they would burn his retinas, render him briefly blind.  But it wasn't blindness that he really wanted.  It was something else altogether.

Numbness.

I cannot do this she had said, and in those four words he knew he had nothing in response.

And beneath a mottled sky the car sat beneath clouds unfolding themselves, pulled apart as so much cotton and breaking up the storm that had throttled them in their very brief discussion in the car.

And the absence was more than a silence, more than a lack of presence.  It was like an umbilical had been disconnected...a space walk untethered now dooming to a slow drift in the cold black air of space.  Maybe to slowly float down, moving at a speed unfathomable...to suddenly catch fire and burn up in re-entry and maybe somebody would call it a shooting star and make a wish.

And there had been no conflict.  There had been no brief war.  It was almost a hospice moment...something was dying, everybody could see it and it merely just needed a time and a place.  It wasn't peaceful, but it wasn't supposed to be.

He saw the console, filled with pennies dimes and nickels.  He wondered how many wishes he might have with those.  Probably not enough.  Probably nowhere near enough.

But he grabbed a handful, emptying the last coin and opening up the door.  Ahead of him was a series of tide-pool like puddles, the ground bumpy and filled with the rain in silver pools that streaked with the reflection of the clouds.

He walked a short ways, alternating his path, gently tossing a penny or silver coin into one of the puddles, a small splash remarking his effort.

He exhausted the small collection of coins, and when the last dark penny disappeared beneath the rain-water surface he walked back to the car.  Out of coins.  Out of wishes.

He drove away, the car pitching and dipping as it hit the holes filled with water, driving over the coins he had flipped and tossed and likely crushing them further into the dirt until any chance of a wish embedded itself with the mud and dirt between the grooves of his tires.

He was neither blinded nor numb.