Free Stories From the Plague Years by Michael Marano

you.”
    “Had a bad day.”
    This is one of her favourite tactics. Belittling me indirectly, making me not important enough to discuss, a nonentity, our relationship only worth mentioning as a thing not worth mentioning to her shrink. I see this now with hindsight. At the time I didn’t know why I was suddenly so upset, and why I found being upset comforting as wrapping myself in a treasured old quilt.
    “Well, what happened today that was so bad?”
    “Nothing.”
    No words, as Schumann plays behind us a moment. She speaks again, touching the stem of her glass.
    “Dean, you really hurt me when you exclude me from your life.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    —Why didn’t you break up with her?
    Clarity made our stage a world made of glass. The
hard and shadowed words
, that defined our journey into the realm where the poetry of Justice is sharp enough to cut the flesh of ghosts, folded themselves into the hidden sheen of that glass.
    —I gave her all the power in the relationship. I let her own me. I had nothing . . . no real job, not in school. I needed someone to show myself that I could have something, a relationship, anything. But the relationship belonged to her.
    I felt naked now that the
hard and shadowed words
slept, or had perhaps bowed in reverence to Catherine, the Beatrice of my descent into the realm those words so cruelly defined.
    —What did Catherine get from the relationship?
    —She had a victim.
    A great fluster as Catherine gets her coat, checks her brittle, protein-starved hair that, like her body, won’t bow to her magazine-ad-defined will. I wait on the limbo of her couch, jacket on my lap like a sick and needy cat. The ferns by the window she’s just watered cry droplets to the hardwood floor.
    “Don’t,” she says.
    “What?”
    “Don’t rush me.”
    “I’m not.” I leaf through
Cosmopolitan
. It occurs to me, against my wishes, that Catherine’s apartment is a figment out of old catalogues. Once upon a decade, a photograph of this place would have shilled an offer for a Windham Hill CD, free with the purchase of the coffee table. I am sadly unhandsome enough to fit the retro-yuppie tableau in which I’m placed, sadly under-dressed, and my jaw not nearly square enough. It’s twenty minutes until the movie starts. Catherine didn’t start getting ready until five minutes ago, complaining from the bathroom that she can’t get her blush right. Though she is beholden to her impossible standards, our departure time is hers to own, and I’m a squatter within it.
    “I wish you’d stop breathing down my neck,” she says from the closet, amid the click of cedar hangers.
    “I’m trying not to,” I say as I skim an article on flirting and office politics. She sighs loudly. A woman of infinite patience, she, to tolerate an ill-shod fool like me. She reminds me of this. Often. With rolls of her eyes and expulsions of breath from her aerobics-toned lungs. I open my mouth, but say nothing, a sliver of my awareness touching the memory of a great black-armoured ant, its fierce jaws opening and clamping in silent protest, as it died under circumstances its hundred-million years of adapted perfection couldn’t understand.
    We enter the revival house late, but don’t miss the beginning of
Casablanca
. We come in during the old Warner Brothers cartoon. It’s one I’ve loved since I was a kid, in which Bugs Bunny has to return a lost penguin to Antarctica. I laugh out loud, as does the entire audience. Except for Catherine. She gives me looks, as if my braying embarrasses her at a refined garden party. When the cartoon ends, everyone in the theatre applauds. As does Catherine.
    During the movie, she becomes a little girl, swept away by the story. She talks out loud, pointing at the screen, remarking how beautiful Ingrid Bergman was, loudly as if we were in her living room, watching one of the shows about dashing professionals she loves so much that feature the kind of handsome, rich lawyers and