But Space and Time

Joseph Thomas

There was a soft blue light laid among the cast of the streetlamps, and a couple walked over the edge of yellow hue into the steel burn of the darkened sidewalk. They had a hand each in the other’s, tensioned together like heavy planets in elliptical orbit, and they were moving between blue seas now, strobing in an island of yellow. As they left the last of the yellow isles, the sidewalk split, one part curbed off right, and she leaned into its banked motion so that he met the weight of her body equally, and the gravity in their arms slung them back tight together while they followed the concrete straight down into the backway with rocks behind the houses where the only light or witness was the dim heat of stars.

“I like those earrings on you.”

“Thanks.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen you wear them before.”

“I’ve had them for a bit.”

“Do you like them?”

“They’re just earrings.”

He braced his jaws and sucked on the inside of his gums. “So they’re not from anyone?”

“No, not anyone that really matters anymore.”

“I think the last time you wore them was around last spring.”

“Yeah, they remind me of new flowers.”

The moon was rising among the stars just above the wall that ran atop the slope opposite the houses in the heat of the night. He gave it a glance, then laid his eyes down on her face and saw that it was as common as the rocks along the white sidewalk. The round features sat in all the lame attributes of domesticity, and her hair was locked in that permanent straight fall to earth, but the eyes were recast in some new nostalgia, suspending him in the rhythmic sway of her head, a castaway between past and present, someone hunting along the shoals for real commonality with what he saw and what he remembered.

“Look at me straight on. Did you grow taller?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you have on new shoes or something?”

“No, why are you so obsessed with my wardrobe all of the sudden?”

“I don’t remember being able to look you right in the eyes ever.”

“Stop. You’re being weird.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, I don’t want to talk about it, I just want to keep walking.”

He opened his mouth but forced it shut and rubbed his eyes intentionally while he began to follow her. She was walking with the blue light softened over her curves, glancing at him from the shadows in her brow. He took her hips from his right hand over to his left, feeling the familiar spaces in her ribs as he tried to re-measure the length in her steps over the bottomless white sidewalk.

“Do you remember the walk we went on last summer?”

He squinted, “Which one, we went on quite a few.”

“The one where we ended up spending the night at your place.”

“Which time?”

“It was only that one time.”

He took his breath in, “Yeah, you’re right, there was only the one.”

“What other nights could it have been?”

“What do you mean?”

“It seemed like you got it mixed up with another few nights or something.”

“Probably with the ones that fall. We spent more time together then than in summer. I gotta take a piss quick.”

His hand rushed from her a little too quickly, and he went off to the right, up the rock-covered slope to the wall that separated them from the road till he blended in against the shadows. She looked back aways down the sidewalk and saw the last house then up the other way to see a small road supported by a dirt bank over the sidewalk. She heard the crunch of rocks and turned to look at him. He looked like a phantom fresh from space, contending with gravity in cold homely flesh, but the cosmic marionette motions were still his and the disheartened lies, tucked in a new, Martian way behind the corners of his lips, had always been there, and the blue moon haloed high behind him was only so foreign because she ignored it so often.

He put cold fingers over her hip bone and led her away from the houses. As they walked, the sidewalk began to dip down below the horizon of the street, and they saw a white concrete tunnel burrowed into the supporting bank with dim yellow lights suffused in the walls. He took her into it just as the moon began to peak overhead and put her against the wall as he felt the heat like jungle fever wrapped around him, pressing his mouth over well-worn contours from trim lips down her cheek to the neckline, her body beginning to methodically wave along the desires in his breath.

“Do you remember the brook I took you to this spring?”

“I do, yeah.”

“Did you like it?”

“Mhm, it was pretty.”

“What were you thinking about that day?”

“Not really sure.”

“Was it about someone else?”

He had both arms pulled around her. “May have been.”

“Is there a reason for it?”

She gave him her cheek and put her arms between them. “Sometimes it’s just too much.”

“What is?”

She was speaking with limp breath in a rigid chest. “Thinking about you and being with you. I care about you a lot, and it hurts too much sometimes.”

“Is that why you went out with him, because it hurts to be with me?”

She had an empty stance and placid tears, so he grabbed her hard till he knew she felt some pain and began the rote motions over her neck again, feeling the skin under his tongue, his eyes open against the concrete. He took himself back and led them to drift away from where they had come, to the end of the tunnel and back into the moonlight right above them. The wall blocking the road was on their left now and the houses with their light coming through the black slits washed up along the right of the sidewalk they were going down.

He looked at her gait, still gauging out the steps. He thought that perhaps her height had always been this way, that maybe he had never taken the time to look at her evenly. Maybe they had just been strung out, too much over too far.

“You look like you’re in pain.”

“It’s nothing, it’s fine.”

“Let me see.”

“Stop.”

She noticed deep tan marks etched like teardrops in his neck.

“Where’d you get those?”

“Nowhere.”

“Did someone give them to you?”

“I got them in the heat of some moment, not certain where or when though.”

The oppressiveness in the air was tracking with the moon’s descent, and her skin finally met it with equal temperature, but she felt no line between herself and the waves of air around her. It was like being in tropic water, where stillness meets no resistance and there is an empty wholeness in the pit of the stomach, a disconcerting contented-ness with being adrift in that current-less part of the world.

“Are we lost?”

“How could we be lost?”

“Should we keep going?”

“With what?”

“On this path I mean.”

“It seems to be on course for where we came from, but I’m not too sure.”

They kept walking for a bit over the streak of white sidewalk, away to where they had come from. He moved her from his left to his right while hot beating air began to blow dry the sweat off his other hand. She kept her head looking at the path as the moon was beginning to run tangential to the wall.

“This path has been going on for a while.”

“It has.”

“You think it’ll stop soon?”

“Do you want it to?”

“No, I was just asking.”

“The end should be coming up here.”

They continued on till they reached the dark blue hollow they had started from, and the moon was nearly hidden below the wall on their left. The yellow isles of streetlamp light were in front of them as they came out from the bend in the sidewalk; and the plummeting moon began to tease other nights in tropic seas, though in going down it will only ever rise again to view the star-matched lovers walking below spent neighborhoods and familiar Leonids.