Welcome to the Future.

The inside was a visual instruction manual for the world of your traditional American minimalist, the floors uncarpeted hardwood, walls an antiseptic white (more of that…) a chair here, a couch there, nothing that didn’t need by necessity to be there, no television, stereo, portraits, wall hangings, lamps, plants, doodads, just plain-Jane next-to-nothing but not unwelcoming, not unwarm, comfort here in all the non-present modes of comfort. E. asks her to remove her shoes, which she does, funny, because he leaves his on, asking her to take off her coat while remaining in his, things which she feels no need to question for after all this is his house and regardless of whether or not the rules make sense they are his and must be held in the highest respect because, well, we want much from this experience, too much to risk it all on superfluous rudeness, right? Right. She wonders what it would feel like to lie naked on her back against this stiff, unyielding floor while he fucks her, his sweat dripping down off his chin onto her collar bones, her nipples, the planks of wood digging into the meat of her ass while his meat digs into the meat of her… wonders if discomfort is an acceptable trade off for a long-awaited show of affection, making up her mind that yes, yes it is. Minimalist or not the man’s got to at least own a mattress, not an animal, though she’d settle for a sleeping bag, a pile of hay, being bent over a kitchen counter… she’d settle for just about anything…

He leads her through an untouched corridor, not by any physical guidance but by telepathical pull, the sunk-hook doing all the real work and as she heeds these mind-commands that oh-so fragile mind of hers goes a-wandering and the things she could do with a place like this! A woman’s touch, really, is all that was lacking. She could be just as much of a minimalist as her beloved E. here but that didn’t mean there’d have to be this much sacrifice in the name of taste. Plus she’d have the children to worry about. Then again, you don’t really have to baby-proof what isn’t there to project harm… This room off to the right would make an ideal dining room with one of those exorbitantly long-lacquered mahogany tables set about with wing-backed chairs, maybe paint the walls a lush burgundy, some wine color, some darkwood paneling perhaps… oh! and over here to the left, what an amazing sitting room we could have with ceiling-high book shelves loaded with Shakespeare and other poignant potables… the kitchen is, well, huge, huge in the way of often-glimpsed-but-never-seen four star restaurant cookeries with a mammoth center island positioned beneath a serpentine tin exhaust vent, the stove, sink, dishwasher, all an opaque, untarnished silver, countertops roughed-hued marble, floor an eerily familiar off-white tile… but infinitely more impressive than the kitchenette she squeezes through at home. She sees herself in a fifties-film-era vignette, black and smudgy around the picture’s edge, done up in a neat apron, hair back in a tight bun and leaning over the stove there covered with quietly bubbling pots, bringing a wooden cooking spoon dripping with home-made marinara to her lips, the children running about and tugging on the hem of her polka-dotted house dress, husband/father E. coming in, alligator-skin briefcase (though hard to distinguish in black-and-white) clutched in that once-umbrella hand, the other lifting off his fedora to lean in and kiss the missus picturesquely on the cheek…

“What would you like?” E. has turned to face her, his frame eclipsing Cleaver Land and bringing her back to the now of things. He’s smiling again in that off sorta way, eyes a little too focused but she hardly notices. My, how perfect a match we are. All I need to do is ease up eversoslightly on tippy-toes for our lips to meet, lock, love… she mistakes the gleam in his eyes for lust.

“Oh… whatever you’re having is fine…” dreamy, ready-for-sleep pre-dream cuteness, those visions not-yet-a-dream that come just ahead of the Sandman to distract you while he does his work, putting you under and you don’t even realize he was there. She leans toward him but he holds her back, gently, with one erect finger.

“No,” the smile continues. “This is your day, Corrin. It’s your day and you can have whatever you want.”

“Anything…?”

“Anything.”

Well now, that was something she hadn’t expected. When was the last time she’d sat down and actually thought about what she wanted to eat? Sometime in that never-really-real time before Charles. After that (him) it had been the same, same, same. The same lunch every day. Why? Because those were the meals that Charles had prepared for her. A man of routine, that old Husband of hers. He’d be up at the crack of dawn (cracking like a whip and not sure why he got up so early, just that sort of person I guess) making her sandwiches for her, father owned a butcher shop somewhere down around Long Beach (wow, when was the last time I thought of that?), always with this gross excess of salami, some incongruency between salami and the citizens of Long Beach, another “just one of those things” kind of things, sending it up to the house on Sunday afternoons in string-tied wax paper packages, a whole week’s supply of salami, a whole week’s worth of lunches, and Charles in the kitchen peeling off three thin-cut layers of speckled meat skin with those too-delicate-for-butchering fingertips. The old man’d died so long ago now it defied memory, before Charles’ accident with fate, back in the only really real time, but a man of routine and when the father was in the ground, when the shop windows were plastered over with red-on-white COMING SOON! posters, when that now uneventful Sunday afternoon hour rolled around with no delivery to be made he put on his shoes and walked out to buy his own, decidedly insuring that the routine would continue and though he never came out and said it, though she never asked out of love for him, she knew it was because Charles needed, even in this small way, to keep the memory of his father alive, that as long as their sandwiches were set out in their brown paper bags every morning he could pretend Death had never reared it’s ugly head, that nothing had changed, and when he joined the father in the fresh-tilled earth of the family plot she started putting on her shoes and the memory remained. Two lives, two generations living on through, of all things, a salami sandwich.

And now she can’t remember the date, that far-off fantasy morning when she’d woken up to find the bed next to her unslept in, the early-dawn light redder than blood oozing through the slats of the Venetian blinds like thin slivers of Hell’s fire, knowing at once that something was wrong, that same knowing attributed to dogs, to people with ESP and their sixth- and seventh-senses, knowing without being able to understand “how,” only that it was unquestionably true, the chain of routine broken, getting up unhurriedly, not because she didn’t care, wasn’t worried, but because the longer it took to find out the “what” the longer until it had to be true. She made the bed, taking great care in choosing her clothing for the day, laying it out across the bed spread in a form eerily similar to a chalk outline, these subtle hints of not-quite-rightness, taking a twenty minute shower, shampooing and conditioning with designer products, soon to drop several pegs on the hierarchical ladder to the more affordable rung of “thrift,” painting her nails, both finger- and toe-, doing her hair the way Charles had liked it best, up in a loose ponytail with one seductive lock haphazardly dangling over her right eye, sitting down at the vanity for a half-hour of make-up application, the last time, what remnants of that kit stuffed in an unmarked box in a storage unit outside of town. Everything had to be just right, had to be perfect, subconsciously working to balance a not-quite-right counterweight. Once ready she went downstairs, again slow and methodical in movement, sitting in the Lazy-Boy recliner next to the phone and waited, her mind a blank canvas, not wondering, not deciding, but waiting, endlessly waiting for some Rembrandt to call and show her the hidden art of the unknown and when the call came she did not loser her composure, did not cry, scream, ask God “why,” but took those details fed to her, fed to her by a voice both distant and robotic in its platitudes and condolences, as a student in class, jotting it down line-by-line in her mental notebook to be studied and understood at a later time, some future she’d never expected to actualize, materialize by whatever version of herself would exist in that “when.” It was hard to see what Corrin that would be, the one she had always been already gone, stopped being the moment she aw those unruffled sheets and “knew,” never to return and really, how could she? She’d existed as a specific being specifically existing in the specific world she shared with Charles and now he was gone and that world, that existence had left with him, a new world now, a new experience and a new Corrin wearing herself like an unfamiliar suite to wade through it one unfamiliar step at a time.

Seven. Seven years ago that had happened and she’d been floating, floating ever since.

“Here you go.”

E. Tromal slid the plate across the countertop toward her, looking down at the perfectly made salami-and-rye she only vaguely remembered asking for, the one thing in this world, oddly enough, that she desired, not necessarily for the routine but because it had felt appropriate, had felt right, as if by eating it (for what she already peripherally felt to be the last time) Charles could finally be put to rest. When the thought occurred to her, her first mental-response was to break down in all the ways she hadn’t since Then, to cry, scream, pull at her hair, collapse and the way E. Tromal was looking at her she knew it would be okay, that in some weird way he was conscientiously doing all of these things so that she could have closure, somehow he knew. But the reaction passed without passing, instead an uncharacteristic veil of ease drifted down and around her, light, gossamer fabric, like angels’ wings or what she imagined angels’ wings would feel like, brushing her, soothing her, taking the cradle of bread between her fingertips, carefully, as if holding aloft some delicate and irreplaceable ancient artifact, the barely-noticeable, slightly sour hint of rye tweaking her nostrils, smooth undercurrents of the meat that had manifested itself as the single most constant rock in her life, wrapping first lips then teeth on and into it, tasting memory, licking the past, chewing and swallowing all that had come before, feeling an inner warmth as everything, bit by edible bit, was transformed into the insignificant trivialities of “was” and “had been” via esophagus and guttural tract, turned to waste, returned to dust, moving onward because we must.

“How did he die?”

As far as appropriateness goes when it is thusly propelled into motion this would have been the point, under traditional circumstantial controls, where Corrin, or anyone else in a similar situation, would have chocked on their sandwich and not only because of a complete lack of what is commonly deemed “appropriate” on his part but also because there was no reason for him to have any knowledge whatsoever concerning Charles or any other once in her life but not longer. Yet there was nothing odd about it for her, continuing to chew while formulating an answer as if he’d offered some banality in reference to the weather or politics and after she’d swallowed speaking in the most casual of tones:

“He was out… (throat clear)… sorry. He was out, on his way home from work. He was a financial consultant, working off of La Brea, a lot of late nights. It was tax season so he usually didn’t come home until after I was asleep. I guess that’s why I didn’t think anything was wrong until the morning… (bite, chew, swallow)… They found him the next morning in a parking deck about a mile from his office. Charles… (smile)… he was conscientious about his weight. His father was a really big man, almost three-hundred pounds, a butcher down in Long Beach, so he tried to walk, Charles I mean, my husband, as much as he could. He’d park a mile from work just to force himself to do it… (bite, chew, swallow)… He was lying next to his car. Someone, they never found out who, had stabbed him, just once, in the chest. They said by the look on his face that he’d gone quietly, no pain, which I guess is kind of odd for being stabbed in the heart… (shrug)… They said he looked so calm, so at peace… like he’d known it was his time, was ready for it, natural… (bite, chew, swallow)… At first they thought it was a symbolic murder, by the way he was lying, on his back, feet together, arms spread apart, like Jesus. Funny… (throat clear, smile but smaller)… he wasn’t even that religious. I used to have to twist his arm to get him to go to church with me, even on Christmas Eve…”

“It was a robbery then?”

Corrin shrugged. “No, not really. The only thing missing was his wedding ring…” Four fingers lightly fondled her right hip pocket, raised fabric leaving clues. “I never bothered asking questions. Didn’t get any answers anyway.”

There was one bite of sandwich left. Just one. Her eyes focused on it, half a mouthful at most yet larger than all the world, all past histories and the vast expanse of universal memory, one bite safe-guarding the future, so close to being free, finally free, to being pulled in one quick flick of the wrist to the humming tune of reeling fish line (one hundred thirty-eight pound test) into a new world, a new life… She popped it in her mouth, savoring with every last bud on her tongue, feeling it disintegrate under the caressing currents of saliva, swallowing that one last swallow and feeling the long black veil fall from her shoulders to the floor, through the floor, into the past alone with everything else.

A river trout, rainbow flanked, bursts forth from the once calm, clear reflective surface of icy-cool water into the warm-orange light of lingering day, scales shimmering like a shawl comprised of millions of glowing, self-sustaining stars and with a quick flick of tale and a darting dance of expelled liquid drops lands safe and willingly into the mighty fisherman’s waiting palms.

“There.”

There was a hint of smile hanging at the corner of E. Tromal’s mouth, those cobalt-blue eyes soft and knowing in ways only Buddha himself could have understood, leaning against the opposite edge of the center-island countertop, looking down upon the relaxed shoulders of the liberated and her up at him, this might-be-savior with thoughts returning in full force, her naked back arched off of some white downy mattress cover conforming to contrasted shoulder blade ridges below the weight and thrust of a love too long coming…

“Who are you?” She asked, a dream voice void of distorting cone.

“All things in time.”

Something was happening to the air between their intertwined gaze, no longer static, a connection being made, the almost-understanding of intent, desire, perhaps even a bit of truth, on one hand the knowing of what was to come, prior recognition, second sight, fact lacking any reasonable basis of justifiable logic while the other a growing sense of belief, of a distant spot of light, glimpsed, a possibility, lost in the translation of ebbing and flowing molecules and wishful lines of ciphered dendrite code like churning ribbons of oil and water molding in-and-about in psychedelic swirls designed to trick the mind and betray reason, allowing enough time for nature to run its course before the undefiable cogs of Order.

Fresh light had been streaming in through window panes for some time now, Corrin noticing for the first time, the November kitchen turned liar, sewing serpentine seeds of spring, lifting her that last rung into unfamiliar realms of calm and ease, putting her at last wholly off her guard, committed now to the lyrical lines of misinterpreted poetry flitting across blue-steal corneas. Birdsong drifted in from the foreign shores of vast oceans, gulls transformed to sparrows, larks, each with their melodic tweets and chirps of fairy-tale ever-afters. Thoughts returned to love, sitting on a throne of thornless rose in a grand, bright-bannered court of kings, back to Beaver and family, to home-cooked meals and work-weary-over-affections of a clean-suited husband, licking tissue and towel corners with a mother’s spit, the universal cleanser, applying cloth to soiled cheeks and grass-stained knees, rocking baby to sleep, humming in tune to jewlerybox lullabies and the soft infant cooings of love before language, multitudinous pieces of a puzzle portrait in constant disorder falling after all these years snuggly into place.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

Without shifting eyeline, without the slightest deviation of a single blink, E. motioned with his head. “End of the hall…” words spoken in sage-like rhythm “…on the left.”

“Thanks…”

She felt the target of his eyes as she walked away, looking over her shoulder before passing under the trimmed arch of the hallway to see him still watching, still half smiling, tucking her hair back behind an ear in that distinctly feminine way characteristic of most at the chance for love and then nipping out of sight.

E. Tromal opened a drawer.