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By Root 383 0

known in whom I found solace and in whom I found love. So in order to hear her stories, to keep her voice in the room, I never told her that in my version I was a kitchen boy who skipped smooth shards of stone across a silent lake, that as they skimmed the water's surface they would sing. The stones landed one by one each day at the feet of a scholar-prince, who strolled the shore, contemplating the water and its relationship to the sky. At first the scholar-prince was too immersed in his own thoughts to notice, but then the stone shards began to amass, noticeably altering, intruding upon his tranquil path. The scholar-prince interrupted his reverie and picked up a shard, and as he was about to fling it back into the lake, he noticed a single word cut into its surface. Intrigued, he examined the others and found that each bore the traces of a different word. He, being a scholar-prince, naturally recognized that they were the broken pieces of a poem. Love was the subject. He, being a man, thought it was a challenge and a game. The scholar-prince rearranged the stones and composed a response. He sent them skipping across the lake. Of course, the lake was "misty." Some things are classic and should never be changed. Mist, as I had learned from my mother's stories, allows unlikely lovers to meet and forbidden subjects to wander the land. In my stories, the lakes are in a perpetual state of mist or under heavy cover of ocean-borne fog. As the stones crossed and recrossed the lake, each one a fragment of a rippling, luminous poem, the scholar-prince fell deeply in love with the kitchen boy who was now a man, and in the end, well, the end for me is always the same.

***

Even with my eyes closed, I know. Emptiness lowers the temperature of any room. I breathe in deeply, searching for coffee burning inside a still warm pot, for soap or shaving lotion evaporating, a fragrant steam rising from the bare surface of skin. I roll over on my back and listen for water flowing from a tap—hot and cold each have their own rhythm—for the rustling pages of a newspaper, for the sound of steady breathing in an otherwise silent room. No, nothing but absence mouthing the same wordless tune. I open my eyes and look around me. The light of a December sun hangs, a faded gray curtain, from the windows. Bottles of wine lie on the table, tipsy from their own fumes. Russet-colored pears, half-eaten, bear the bite marks of distracted eaters. Nubs of candles sit in pools of melted wax.

I will forget that no one came to dinner last night. I will forget that we celebrated Sunday by drinking wine from each other's lips. I will forget the baptismal and the communion. Last night was freely given, I tell myself. Pleasure for pleasure is an even exchange. Lust for lust is a balanced scale.

Do not bother chiming in, Old Man. I do not have to listen to your god anymore. Sad, though, how I can always anticipate both of your condemnations, that they have become second nature to me.

In the end, I get dressed, feeling my toes sinking into the rug by the side of the bed. I put on my socks and tie the laces of my shoes. I comb my hair with my fingers and grab a pear for the walk back to my Mesdames. I put on my coat, and I feel something foreign. The breast pocket, the thing closest to my heart, is stuffed and distended.

"Well, well, well. It looks like I was right all along. Whores do become cooks on boats. You pathetic piece of shit. I knew you would amount to nothing, but I would have never guessed that you would amount to even less. For once, you have exceeded my expectation. My oldest son, the sous chef, and now you, the whore. "The Old Man, being dead and thus clairvoyant, confirms my worst suspicions.

The stairwell is a shaft of dust and dying echoes. Monday, already half gone, has slept in it, has lost its memories in it. The rue de l'Odéon is a smudge of storefronts and cobblestones, a blind spot disappearing from the corners of my eyes. My pace is so quick that I am generating stares. Passersby are astonished by such a burst of speed, annoyed by such an