convo3

as she unlocked the door to their apartment, she sighed, pushing the panic attack back down into her innermost.  her nerves settled slightly and she turned the handle. when she entered, she saw him sitting there, her fallen angel, watching the packers/bears game. the eerie blue of the television filled the room like some twisted icy version of hell. whatever nerves in her that had settled leapt back up with a fire unmatched.

'hey,' he commented without prying his eyes from the screen. the bears, as they had the entire first half of the game, were sucking.

'hi,' she said, not wanting to confront what she knew to be inevitable. she put some of the groceries she'd bought in the fridge. there was the usual; eggs, cheese, and some blackberry jelly. she closed the refridgerator door and set down three boxes of cigarettes next to the stove. she looked back at him, wingless and without motivation, still staring at the t.v.

her heart raced.

a commercial seemed to delay the bears' loss.

he turned to face her, beer in hand. 'how was work?' he asked.
she was still removing her coat and setting down her keys shakily on the small table in the small kitchen of the extremely small highrise apartment building.

'harsh, as usual. some guy died at table 23 today...' she wasn't really thinking about that man though. a quick mental picture flashed through her head of the way his eyes bulged from their sockets and the veins pulsed in his neck and temples as the man's body quickly forced its life from it. she was instead wondering how if she had been the one at twenty-three that had passed on - if her lover would even notice her not arrive home that evening.

'oh really?' he was interested, as he often was concerning the morbid and grotesque, 'how?'
she was slightly angered by this. not at the fact that he cared about how the man died, but this was just how her thought process worked. she had already turned to page forty-eight, and he was still making the decision to stay there or run away.

'it doesn't really matter, does it?' she said, her head turned, grabbing a paper plate from one of the cabinets.

'i guess not.'

'bears are doing really shitty tonight,' she said, looking up, his face sillouetted by the obscenely bright glow of the tubes.

'...i know, right?' he turned back in the direction of the television, and sipped his beer. she contorted her face, making the mental note that he was drinking the excrement of bacteria. Mmm... delicious.

she didn't say anything else and took her blackberry toast into the small bedroom and turned on some vivaldi. the bears' loss was inevitable, just like the evening's confrontation with the man that would eventually come into the room half drunk and too tired for talking or sex was unavoidable.

some things would change. it was a matter of staying there or running away. she just didn't want to be around when the next adventure ended suddenly and without warning. she didn't want either of them to be a table twenty-three.