“You might want to keep your voice down.” eden
The pub throbs, empty but for two tables. Low booming prattle. Match-day statistics. Kits and figures. Precision holds for one of leeches cowards and cutthroats, but a feebleness flicks its silky black tail before slipping away again through the fissures.
Fatherhood not yet mastered: circling the subject of their own share-held beatings, taken and given, sleepless nights, sudden tenderness, bleak bloodless accounts of what shape their rights have taken, as though describing someone else's life.
Old certainties about true love and the current business in France walked back, shrugs, conditional opinions, recent conquests. Conviction is an imposition.
To anyone who has lived through the winters Eden has, there is a weather in her that cannot be muddled through. Michael resents her, unable to frame her in his own idiolect of what women are so cleanly. He pushes open his fist like a bulb growing roots across the table's surface and leans back. "Och, drink with us, sister."
