Spider Legs and Glass Shards

Derek hands her a cup of coffee on the corner of University and 4th. “Happy Birthday…it’s all I could afford,” he says as he kicks a chunk of broken sidewalk. His hands are bloated and shaking more than usual.

“But I made you this,” he says as he point to a hunk of cardboard pushed up against the wheel of his bicycle. It’s a rectangle scrap smeared in oil crayons. It looks like a doomsday depiction of the end of the world with swirling fireballs and abstract melted flowers. It reminds her of a picture she saw in the Watchtower that a Witness dropped by the week before. The front of the booklet dripped with smeary, fiery lines of color, thousands of asteroids falling from the sky. People clutched their heads, their cartoon faces contorted from fear. The last page proved the glory of redemption. Blonde girls skipped around in stiff, sky blue dresses and virgin white knee socks. Blissful men and women swam in a sea of chalk white daisies, arms spread upward to the great beyond, their faces contorted with happiness like the manicky red painted smiles found on clowns in toy cars and checkered pants. She always thought the end of the world looked more inviting.

They stand for a few moments, the same pained clown smiles stretched on their faces. Derek’s hair hasn’t been cut since they broke up last fall. It hangs in his face, greasy locks thinned out with age. He pushes it to the left, to cover his eye, the one that a beebee gun ripped into when he was twelve. She loves his eye, all lazy with a permanently fixed pupil encased in glass.

“I can’t sing in Caragan House. I can't sing with all of those people around,” he sighs. He turns his entire head so he can use his good eye. He faces the downtrodden, one story building that houses 30 men. Three rusty coffee cans line the cement steps, overflowing with yellowed cigarette butts. The butts of 30 men who are ordered to make their beds by 7:00 in the morning, who aren’t allowed back into their rooms until late afternoon, who have to pee in plastic coated cups as staff people watch.

“Shit, there’s these guys who are old…I mean really old. I look in their eyes and don’t feel like there’s hope. They’re like 40 or 50 and still living in some halfway house that tells you when to brush your teeth. I might as well be homeless,” he says.

His eye suddenly brightens with light bulb brilliance. “Yeah, homeless! I can get one of those “need money” signs and turn over my social security check to you, ya know, to help with the bills.”

“I don’t want your money,” she says and sips her coffee. He’s the only one who knows how she likes her coffee. He used to make it for her every morning before she woke up. He must have had some scientific formula, some odd water to coffee ratio or a secret grinding technique. Since they parted, the coffee she makes always tastes like shit.

She tells him about the garden. “Only one poppy made it, but the George Vancouver rose is doing well. I moved the burgundy clematis by the gate where it gets more sun.” She tells him this softly, sliding each syllable, trying to make each word extend forever. She feels like she’s having phone sex as she retells every single step, every new hole dug, every single variegated leaf and blossom accounted for. Tears slip down his cheeks, but she knows he’s watching her lips move.

Before they met, she never knew a glass eye could cry. But now she’s used to the tears pooling, streaming down from his real eye, spilling out from his fake eye. When she watches him cry she likes to pretend his tears are shards of glass.

The traffic lights keeps flipping, flashing colors that are almost too dull to see in the late afternoon light. They stand on the corner as bicyclists and couples with squirmy and sleepy children move around them. Everyone is heading down to the river with blankets and water bottles. They’re waiting for dusk, for popping fireworks to spill on the city sky, to watch the skinny spider legs of fire fall. She wants to avoid the crowds of people breathing one another’s bug spray, the over tired kids jacked up on cotton candy, the man who used to be her partner that is moments away from becoming a bum pushing a shopping cart full of rags and bird seed.

“I’m sick of being a retard. They won’t even let me near the stove. Everything they feed us comes in a fucking bucket. They shove all of these bratwursts, burnt hamburgers and Tuna Helper crap in gallon buckets and serve them to us. Buckets of fucking meat!” He laughs. “But really, I cannot sing in that house.”

She turns to walk away. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he never sang in the first place.