Sculpture Garden

Caitlin tasted like smoke.

She had reservations, he could tell in her careful demeanor, in the quiet nervous way in which she constantly attended to the task of pushing her read hair behind her ears. So they talked slowly, like two people circling each other. Some questions found answers, others were deftly parried. They sat for some time like that, talking across some seemingly unbreachable gap, on the long bar, the lights dimmed and the rain picked up.

The conversation languished and with his hand on the small of her back, they exited one bar for another. He was a stranger not only to her, but here so she picked. And as they walked in silence, her smoking, and him staring down the street he assumed led to their intended destination he thought on how similar this particular part of broad street was to so many other places he had once lived.

Caitlin tasted like smoke.

The bar she picked was her own. He could tell, he remembered very acutely that wonderful feeling of having a place one felt comfortable. They sat and she order and they played one four twenty four. He feigned dismay as she won nearly every turn, but every dollar he turned over to her he though was well spent, her laughter would tumble out of her.

It was a beautiful flitting thing, a laugh that pirouetted with the joy of little girl. Her eyes were so light they were nearly clear, and the dress she had chosen was dark, over the knee, and the prettiest she owned. He could tell.

Caitlin tasted like smoke.

A band was setting up. She asked him a question and choked down her room temperature shot of gin- rule of the house, the consequence of an errant die. He told her about this boy he had seen in birmingham in a strip mall bar. He wasn't much to look at thin with shaggy blonde hair, and he assended the makeshift stage shirtless he couldn't have been much older than eighteen. But the sound that came from the guitar for the next twenty five minutes he would never forget. The boy played with a frantic youthful energy, building a cathedral of sound moment by moment.

She said that the best things in life were like that, surprises in ordinary places.

Caitlin tasted like smoke.

This bars band began, and he thought while it was not like that night in alabama, it was still quite something. The sound of the four of them and the way the girl wailed filled all the empty spaces.

Instincts take over in small places full of sound. The crowded swayed in their silence, and when a passerby nudged her without thought he braced her.

He thought then he had forgotten, or almost forgotten, how soft girls were. He maneuvered her on to the stool, her skin so pale had taken on a drunken glow. There nose to nose they lingered.

The sound stop and the room gave up the ghost. Unfettered what was once whole drifted apart and the choir of individual conversations rose and their moment dissipated.

Caitlin tasted like smoke.

He walked her to her apartment, a block and a half from the bar. The kiss seemed conceived in e that lingering moment nose to nose even if it was born on her porch. And what followed was mostly the inertia of the alcohol. But there in the yellow haze of the exterior lights, he heard a little lustful gasp. And as only a sound can do he remembered what he had not be able to feel for months.

A timid invitation and his less than graceful decline.

Walking he lost himself again, in a memory. He couldn't remember how many times he done it. Made those sounds on an empty sidewalk. It seemed all great repetition: his footsteps, the blocks, the nights, the particular feeling of walking home alone. The only thing he found that could break that terrible feeling were was clinging to a little truth.

And as all the particular drifted into commonalities he did his best to remember what couldn't be ignored.