Stone Fruit

 

How anyone ever decides anything according to what they believe they’ll continue indefinitely to want or not want because they want or don’t want it now, it’s beyond me. Although that in some sense is what I’m doing and better put nothing per se is beyond me, nothing I myself might do. Slugging S once in despair across the shoulder wasn’t beyond me, leaving a bar with the boyfriend of someone I genuinely admired wasn’t beyond me. Why not extrapolate from there. From here, eating breakfast on the floor. The wooden dish of cherries: before me. The tang: within me. Only the pit beyond.

 

 

Memory

 

Borrowed cat is frantic for love. Incensed. Or just touch, attention really, what to call it without the shimmery flick of anthropomorphism, that magic wand. When she wails, scrapes the bedroom door, paws my belly, clambers up my chest to cleave her feet at the base of my neck and bash her head against my jawbone, livid, thrumming, a little engine of longing to be the one true cat, and when I succumb and set whatever I’m thinking onto the floor and comb her ears through my fingers, muss the weft of her fur, cup her lukewarmth against me as if I’d discovered her myself, tiny náufraga, sundered orphan, I wonder if she’ll remember later, that she appealed for tenderness and got it, asked and was answered, did not seem to need anything else for a moment. Or who knows if she didn’t. Not that memory necessarily has any bearing on what you come to want again.