- Polite Fictions

The day was just beginning but Charlie thought only of endings. She hit her cigarette and exhaled a cloud of unformed dough. This was her curse, a life lived inside a web of baking metaphors. She ached for more expansive meaning, a new cake rising - dammit - but it seemed to her that all her oven's timers were buzzing all at the same time. Everything was done. Her father's last words in the hospital, just three weeks ago, sounded through her head. "There's no light, Charlie. No tunnel. The end. It's just a laughing whore." She yearned for a clearer recipe. "I love you" maybe. Or "You were a good girl." But her father was never a man of simplicity nor clarity and this, no doubt, informed her taste in men.

She kept her head down as she passed the corner boys peddling crack and smack and screaming "It's the blast!" A laughing whore crossed the street and Charlie winced in the presence of such a luminous coincidence. The whore laughed. Everything was done. The money they won in Vegas was gone. She had quit drinking again. The seasons ended on all the TV shows. And she had written the letter.

A blackbird cawed and she imagined sticking a fork in its head. The image startled her. She had no special hatred for birds. Actually, she liked birds. The blackbird's caw was ominous but it certainly didn't call for a fork in the head. Was slick OK? Oh, who cares? He didn't love her the way she needed to be loved. She was no key lime pie. If that bastard cared at all, he would've called by now. She could hear his excuses now. "I couldn't get a signal." "I lost track of time." "Someone shot me in the shoulder." Shot in the shoulder? Charlie marveled at the strange yeast in the thoughts that kept rising, unbidden, in the oven of her mind.

She paused in front of the bar and thought again about her father. He was dead. But where did he go? Maybe the letter didn't need to mean the end. What if, hidden in the letters and words, a new beginning lingered? It occurred to her that life was a doughnut. She entered the bar. Sobriety, like words, was a fragile thing. Very fragile.