What Else Is There to Say?
After Meeting in a Post-Katrina Casino, Their One Night Stand Comes to an End
by Michael Garriga
They stand on the edge of a faint neon glow, the sand packed and rippled beneath their bare feet. Small puttering waves run over their toes, the moon hidden by dense clouds.
"Do you realize what just happened," he asks, buttoning his jeans, smiling.
She smiles back. "Yeah, I think so."
"You were a young widow," he says, "living in a dirt floor lean-to in southern Nebraska. I was a drifter heading west. I saw you hanging wash over a stretched hemp rope. You fed me beans and corn tortillas I can still taste in my beard."
She falls back against him, her summer dress disarrayed. "Oh yeah?"
He takes her hand and kisses her wrist. "It was a summer day, and you invited me in. I stayed sleeping in your floor two days. One night as you slept I touched you and you said, ‘No,’ and stood and hit me in the face. I knocked you to the ground and started away and you grabbed my knee and said, ‘No,’ and we made love in the dirt and slept in the dirt and the next morning you woke me with a knife to my throat and demanded I leave. I went outside and mended a broken piece of your fence, and you made us cucumber salad and bean soup and we ate in silence."
She straightens herself and shakes her head and begins to walk away. He follows a few feet. She stops and turns and faces him and he points stupidly at a row of empty lots where buildings might have once stood but now are little more than someone else’s memories and the first pushings of grass through concrete beds.
"No," she says, taking his hand. "That’s only how you remember it, but it’s not the truth. I wasn’t waiting for you. I had killed my husband because I’d had enough of his generous beatings. I slit his throat while he was smacking oatmeal and buried him in my garden and told anyone who happened to ask that he had left me. When you arrived, all I wanted was an escape, but you wanted to settle down. You had some foolish romantic notion about The Plains—something you’d read somewhere—but I knew better. I’d lived it. So I slept with you and stole your horse and left you in that hut. We were both happy; we got exactly what we wanted. You lived to be old and full of years and a town prospered around you and you were adored."
"And you?"
"I didn’t live as long, but I lived fully and on my own terms." She kisses his cheek, and they walk back to the casino in silence, holding hands now and again, feeling the breeze off the water blowing against the sand stuck to their skin. They stand in the parking garage waiting on the elevator. When its doors open, she kisses his cheek one last time: he goes up to his hotel room; she to her home elsewhere.
Michael Garriga is a PhD candidate in Florida State University’s creative writing program, where he serves as co-editor of The Southeast Review. He’s published work in The Black Warrior Review, Poetry Southeast, Louisiana Literature, and Versus: An Anthology. And certainly you can use my email address for reader contact.
