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Sweetness
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
50 Sweetness He cultivates the interior sound of a tone which makes him late for everything that matters. Every night he sits down to dinner as his wife and children are starting their dessert. He finishes alone by stovelight and the sounds of his wife deliberately waiting for him in the living room. Every morning he sleeps thirty minutes too long, his own tone edging out each alarm as it arises. His eggs are cold and the bacon gone. At work he recognizes others more and more by the backs of their heads. Their eyes turn to him and fill with surprise as if to say what are you doing here now? I needed you an hour ago. He eats alone, always has enough, just barely, to pay for lunch, thus never tips, unable to look his waitress in the eye. He eats less and less and grows thin as a runner. He feels affection for everyone but begins to understand that the distress produced in others by his chronic delay is the energy that keeps him alive. There is a space between him and the world and he tunes it like one string of a violin. 51 One day, he holds the bow to its note for one instant longer, and a sweetness fills the space. His wife returns to bed and there is time, her breath like the dampness of flowers after rain. Breakfast is hot and the children hug him on their way out the door. At work the others grow patient and begin to take their cues from him. At lunch time there is money in his pockets, but he strolls past the diners in windows and listens to that one note like a thread running through the loop of each breath. At night, in that space between waking and sleeping, he holds the one note on the one string and feels its vibration moving into his hands and throughout the length of his body. He knows, at last, he is dying. ...