Tremble
- Jul 28, 2023
- 2 min read
by Meg Tuite
It is dark and the branches bent and pointing at me take on a sinister sneer as if to say what is it that you do? I am wind-stooped and bear the ridicule of their whispering fingers. I walk with a look that the feet can’t say, following themselves because it is all that they know. I am sure you are under the same grayed vapors of another city. Remember me when you stare into the fever of faces; that one of them is looking for you…thinks of you…misses you.
I am sick that you work in the charnelhouse of a highrise; windows blind with their own greed-smeared sockets. You are the myriad of difference that beckons a necessary flame to wilt the rooms of pastels.
Epictetus peddled his wares teaching philosophy on street corners and was paid, and you are enslaved by a company of constipated minds. Has the building crumbled yet? One man goes to his neighbor because he seeks himself, another because he would lose himself.
You write in your last letter that you are ‘not made of good company’ as I am sure is the same for me. Today, four hours pass in what seem like less than an hour. Jude the Obscure puts me to sleep, until he sees marriage as an institution of death. It kills whatever relationship exists.
I talk to no one today and it is dark. How beautiful if the day passes and I still don’t know. I am a shell of a person who becomes smaller within the uncut pages of oblivion. Row upon row of buildings bank up next to each other with apartments stacked on top of one another and yet none of us know anyone.
Your call the other night at three in the morning haunts me. ‘Connection is for fools,’ you blast. You’re drunk and bellowing, but I hear a deeper cry within you that scares me. Neither of us is a functioning person. We exist well in the cell we create for ourselves, but outside of it, we mock others, because it is our beings we really despise.
Every night we drink in order to keep from exposing our bruises. Today is one of those rare days when I am left with the feeling that I have accomplished something.
I am going out tonight to get drunk. Soon I will leave this city to get back to us. Don’t let us not be us.
Meg Tuite’s latest collection is Three By Tuite. She is author of six story collections and five chapbooks. She won the Twin Antlers Poetry award for her poetry collection Bare Bulbs Swinging and is included in Best of Small Press 2021 and Wigleaf’s Top 50 stories for 2022. She teaches writing retreats and online classes hosted by Bending Genres. She is also the fiction editor of Bending Genres and associate editor at Narrative Magazine. http://megtuite.com
