C4 antho - Chamber Four

~16~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
so my mind explodes in a fountain of dopamine and adrenaline
and serotonin. But I also like thinking that it’s in a more
quiet, private setting. Maybe she walks me to my door that
first night, after bringing me home from the hospital. Maybe
it’s not for a couple of weeks, after several tension-filled
nights sitting side-by-side on my couch, watching Project
Runway episodes, until finally she gets up the nerve to put
her hand on my knee and I just go for it. Either way, no matter
the circumstances, it is totally ideal, and afterwards she
says, “You are the best kisser ever,” and it doesn’t sound
corny at all.
Pretty soon I move into her house. We buy a yellow
couch. We adopt two cats. We throw dinner parties and
watch Top Chef and carve things into the tree in our backyard.
Our beautiful oak, in our beautiful backyard, big as the
ones in my childhood. We make love under that giant oak,
and afterwards we smoke cigarettes like teenagers. Liz Phair
loves my writing. She leaves insightful comments on my blog
and asks me to read my stories to her at night. I read them in
funny voices, and popcorn shoots out of her mouth when she
laughs, shoulders shaking, her butterscotch hair slick from
the bathtub. My parents love Liz Phair. They are proud of me
for not bringing home another unemployed guitar player.
Her parents are dead at this point, so I don’t have to worry
about what they would think. But sometimes she tells me
about them, how they were kind and good and even though I
am fifteen years younger than Liz Phair, and a girl, and I only
weigh 103 pounds, she swears they would have loved me because
all they ever cared about was her happiness, and with
me, she is content like a golden eagle who swooped around
the skies for years before finding its one true mate. One time
when she says that, she is holding our cat Johnny, and the
moon sneaks in the window and wraps the both of them in a
thick yellow fuzz of air. I write a poem about this fuzz of air,