C39
Public Record
Excerpt from novel: Best Cellar

Edith had the graveyard shift

so she wouldn't be home for three or so hours.
When Edith had the graveyard me and Faye had sleepovers.
It was sort of our thing, this routine:
She knocks a little pattern on the back door,
we finish a bottle of wine she bought and eat fruits and cheeses at the counter.
When our blood is warm enough with old grapes and figs,
we throw a clean sheet over the bed and fuck on it.
Then she takes a bath while I smile at the ceiling,
and when she's done with that we play dice in the nude.
We make up stories about leaving our spouses for one another.
Her hands shaking the dice and her pink mouth get me hot again
so we go back to bed.
When we’re all out of breath and my sack has that aching sort of empty,
she’ll be the big spoon and draw trees and houses on my back
and I’ll guess at what they are.
We talk about
‘What if we were thirty again?’
and get all sad that we’ll never be together, not really,
and that it’s because we’re too old to start over.
She’ll fall asleep on me for a little bit, then
she high-tails it out the backdoor,
long before any headlights come up the driveway.
If, for some reason, Edith were to come home early
and see Faye walking the two blocks to her place,
the plan was to say that she'd just been to our neighbors the Freeman's catching up,
and say that little Collin is in high school now, can you believe it?,
and maybe some other small talk and then just keep walking.
That was the plan.

After Faye leaves, I have a routine for that, too:
Throw the fuck-sheet in the wash, of course,
then put Edie's food in the oven so it’s warmed up when she gets home.
She walks in the door and I meet her in the hallway
so that she can press her whole face into my cheek and make an exaggerated ‘muah’ sound.
She drops her scrubs in the wash on top of the fuck-sheet and lets out an animated sigh.
She puts her nose on my lips and takes in a big long breath with her eyes closed,
then asks me what I had to drink and tells me to fix her some of the same.
We talk about
‘How was your day?’
for a bit and she tells me about some asshole doctor or a sad story about a patient.
When she asks me
‘How about you?’
I'm hoping the perfume has dissolved out of the bedroom already.
We watch a really old movie usually,
and sometimes I smoke a joint to make them seem more profound.
I offer her some but she could get tested any day now, she says.
Anyway, she says, she doesn't do that stuff because she's a good Christian girl.
Like hell, I say, and I squeeze her sides to get a laugh
and a few minutes later she tells me alright roll another one.
We eat ice cream from the carton like giggling kids on the kitchen floor,
and then I chase her upstairs where we both pass out with sticky breath.
And that was the whole thing for graveyard shifts.

It’s not that I hated my wife or loved Faye,
I just can’t stand to be alone.
I loved neither of them and I loved them both.
Depends on who was around, I guess.

Thresher Charles