TRYST

She did…and dreamed and dreamed until she ran out of night. She was making her way around a lushly green but treacherous bank of steep hills, high above a wild valley. Most of the paths had been washed away. There were mud slides to be gotten around, and the ground was so slippery, it was difficult to walk. She came to a narrow ledge under a great overhanging cliff, where a woman coming from the other direction advised her about footholds to use to get to the other side.

Then she dreamed Zeke and Meryl were sitting at the foot of her bed, talking. They thought she was asleep and were planning a tryst. Peeking out from the covers, she noticed Zeke’s face was wrapped in dough all the way up to his eyes. Later she saw he was there alone. He was telling her he wanted her, that it was now or never. But she couldn’t speak or reach out to him because she couldn’t rouse herself from her sleepy torpor. He got up roughly then, turned in her doorway and called her crude names. By this time she was groping, still half-conscious, out of bed, her arms stretched out to him. But he reached down and drew two great pins out of her fur rug and drove them through her palms.

TOAST

Tense and jittery the next morning, Seely took her time going upstairs. When she finally did, she barely had enough time to fix herself breakfast before work. She found Zeke sitting at the dining table with his papers in neat piles in front of him.

“I dreamed about you,” she said, scrambling herself an egg.

“You did?”

After she finished, she sat down across from him and started recounting her dream. He was enumerating items on a note pad. When she stopped mid-sentence, he looked up and asked, “And then?”

But she couldn’t go on. She couldn’t tell him how the dream ended.

He went back to his work for a while, then without looking up, said, “You know I want to sleep with you, Seely, but I can’t go on like this. If you won’t sleep with me, I’m going to find someone who will.”

She stood up suddenly, with her plate of half-eaten toast. “Just any old someone, huh?”

He stood up too and reached out towards her, but she jerked back and walked in a wide arc around him. He sat down again while she stood by the sink, gnawing savagely on her last cold morsel of toast.