11.07.2020

I don’t need that shit, he almost said aloud

The punch-press operator from up north 
met the assembler from West Virginia 
in a bar near the stadium. Friday, late, 
but too early to go home alone. Neither 
had anything in mind, so they conversed 
about the upcoming baseball season 
about which neither cared. We could 
be a couple, he thought, but she was 
all wrong, way too skinny. For years 
he’d had an image of the way a woman 
should look, and it wasn’t her, it wasn’t 
anyone he’d ever known, certainly not 
his ex-wife, who’d moved back north 
to live with her high-school sweetheart. 
About killed him. I don’t need that shit, 
he almost said aloud, and then realized 
she’d been talking to someone, maybe 
to him, about how she couldn’t get 
her hands right, how the grease ate 
so deeply into her skin it became 
a part of her, and she put her hand, 
palm up, on the bar and pointed 
with her cigarette at the deep lines 
the work had carved. “The lifeline,” 
he said, “which one is that?” “None,” 
she said, and he noticed that her eyes 
were hazel flecked with tiny spots 
of gold, and then—embarrassed—looked 
back at her hand, which seemed tiny 
and delicate, the fingers yellowed 
with calluses but slender and fine. 
She took a paper napkin off the bar, 
spit on it and told him to hold still 
while she carefully lifted his glasses, 
leaving him half
blind, and wiped 
something off just above his left 
cheekbone. “There,”
she said, handing 
him back his glasses, “I
got it,” and even 
with his glasses on, what she showed 
him was nothing
he could see, maybe
only make-believe. He thought, "Better 
get out of here before it’s too late," but 
suspected too late was what he wanted.

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