Suture

 The evening is cleaved open, cut right in half with a horizon bleeding out colors as the heartbeat sun tumbles unseen and away, pulling the last strands of daylight into the blackening line that is merely called the West...it is a pencil drawn line from left to right and nothing much happens after the last shred of color finally caves in.

He was decidedly unhappy, watching the light reverse the dawn and fall across the low country of Virginia.  Nothing made him particularly happy...not even the drink in his hand.  He didn't want to admit it but he was at least toying with the idea.

She sutured him.

She closed him up.  All the bits and pieces of the day, the glass shards of stress, the mind-numbing sameness...she flushed them out and quickly sewed him shut, disallowing any return of the grit...the dark colored snow pushed to the sides of the highway, ugly with salt and road sludge.  

He remembered one time when they were driving in Carsley...passing the Methodist church...she was younger, a passenger in a boy's car and they hadn't strayed outside the lines....but as they passed, in the warmth of a sunset she mentioned she'd like to be married there.

So long ago.

He liked to return to that car ride now and again...just the innocent juices of two teens mingling in the minds where no actual physical touch had yet happened.  It was the imagination that was the most beguiling...the unknown...the seduction of what might be...

Until the plain tipped...and she wasn't there as much...seasonal.  Blooming.  He occasioned upon her...and she stood out like the roses grown wild around some abandoned house...flowering, contrasting...making everything ugly beside her regardless...and she didn't notice until he told her.

But she was the salve...her own quiet, unremarkable presence that mattered way more than he intended.  She wrapped him as easily as a bandage...some friction envelopment that staved off a bleed...was like a finger or a hand wrapped around his...

It was often in the evenings when he allowed the door to his quiet mind get opened...a quiet squeal of a doorknob that opened into a dusty room....the raising of a shade facing the east in the morning, a yellowish bright light that spilled in accordingly.

She invaded his thoughts like that...and as much as he tried to push them away with a wave of bourbon they persisted...her voice in the car talking about a ceremony in the church, the way she slide across the car to kiss him, the way she glanced over her shoulder to smile at him in a departure...close-lipped grin like sharing a secret.

It burned when she left...each and every time...like a quick flare if you graze a cigarette accidentally.   A slight red spot, a burn...skin.

And her return...a milky glaze across said burn, a lotion to soothe...a wound to suture...a clench around the pain that numbed.  

He sipped the last bits of bourbon and set the drink down with an echo of crystal against wood...in the quiet it sounded louder...emptier.  

He felt bled out.  He needed her nearby to feel something.  Anything.