Free Shaking out the Dead by K M Cholewa

unintelligent sounding conversation about places and procedures, something vaguely retarded in the rhythms and cadence of their speech. The two stayed for nearly two hours, enduring long silences, unashamed to simply sit in peace. Of the women, only Linda ever verbalized a shy greeting.
    Paris performed the side work that he did in the middle of the night. He took the lid off the sunken vat that had held clam chowder for the previous twelve hours. He dipped in the ladle and spun its contents, determining how much was left. The women knew when the soup was gone, just as a dog knows when you’ve eaten the last bite of your sandwich.
    Linda never ate the soup. Her collarbone and thin wrists made Paris believe she was a woman who lived on coffee and cigarettes, though she never reeked. As usual, she was the last to leave. She didn’t do business at the Deluxe, though her first time there she did say to Paris, “I’m looking for work, if you need anything done.” The service she was offering was unmistakable. Every now and then, before she left, she might ask, “You need anything?”
    Paris would smile and shake his head. It made him feel guilty and ridiculous, those nights, for his offering of soup. He knew that on those nights she hadn’t made her money elsewhere. She would slide off her stool and walk into the inky night.

    î‘
    The sun bided its time beneath the horizon. Paris had left a spotless kitchen and a balanced drawer for Jerry, the old Vietnam vet who worked the morning shift. Paris passed through the streets on his way to the duplex in the light of lampposts standing proud as trees. Quiet doorways blended with windows and walls in the shadows. Fire escapes crept down brick veneers into benign and potholed alleys. Paris thought about a canvas, a twelve by fourteen, he had in his closet. The artist’s task, he knew, was not to reduce the world to two dimensions, but to find the proper detail — the curved spoonful of chowder, the fragile turn of a wrist — the fractal that told the larger story and contained the rest of the dimensions.
    Paris had been saving the canvas. Waiting for the perfect idea. His excuse was that canvases were expensive. Not to be wasted.
    The canvas had been in his closet for a year.
    He reached the library and cut through the park behind it. He passed the concrete water fountain that jutted up from the ground like a squat sentry at the playground’s edge. The swing set and slide stood, sleepy as the trees, caught in the half-dreams of hibernation. He wondered if Tatum, like himself, was unable to cross the park without remembering.
    It was in this park that Paris had kissed her. That they had kissed.
    He stepped past the flat, metal merry-go-round with its silver bars and chronic tilt. The kiss happened the night they’d gone to see a local theater group’s production of Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a fictional encounter between a young Einstein and a young Picasso. The play had launched for Paris a mild obsession with drawing Einstein. Einstein as a janitor. Einstein shooting craps. Einstein selling snow cones.
    It was a summer night, the middle of July, and Paris and Tatum were walking home after the play, cutting through the park as the day’s heat dissipated in the thin mountain air. Tatum’s throat rose from the scoop of a black tank top. A small, cloth purse just big enough for folded money hung from one shoulder across to the opposite hip. Above them, the sky doled out stars. She looked straight ahead as she told Paris that Einstein tried to save the universe from his own equations. When he calculated the destiny of the world as ending in fire or ice, he did more math, she said, grasped for an equation that would say it wasn’t so.
    â€œDid he find one?” Paris asked, stopping at the swing set, partitioned off from the lawn on an island of woodchips.
    Tatum pursed her lips and shook her head no.
    â€œThen,