Free Entropy by Robert Raker Page B

she had shut the bedroom door behind me, I paused and yielded quietly to her advances and apology, unable to ask any of the things that I should have.
    Was I disposable? Or was I a representation of permanence, someone she needed when she slept, when she breathed, as if no one else’s body could fit so tightly inside hers? Would she still touch me in the desolate places of my body, my arid plains of uncertainty and fear, where fallen tears of self-pity and regret became grains of sand, burning the boundaries of my existence? When she touched me would she feel me or someone else?
    I once felt safe, needed. I wanted so much to trust, to honor the compassion that existed in the curves of her hips, the tenderness of her fingertips across my thighs, and the sensual violence in the crashing of her buttocks against the strength of my pelvis. Her moans made the muscles in my aching body crave her, as her hair collapsed across her collarbone, her body leaning, yearning, her nipples warm against the outer edges of my lips.
    I wanted her to tell me the truth and to caress me. But her touch frightened as well as aroused me. I was like a child, both curious and afraid of the encompassing dark, the terrible secrets that it held within its absence of color, within its bones and skin; secrets I now feared to hear her to even whisper as I withdrew and came on the inside of her thighs. In the young twilight, I held Hannah. I kissed the small of her back and she turned reaching towards me, the light splashing across the plane of her stomach, and a smile forming in the corners of her beautiful mouth.
    However, all I could think was that I should have never saved her, merely held her close as we drowned. I had a difficult time in dealing with the chilling truth inherent in that. Our marriage, our closeness had become poisoned.
    Sitting on the river bank, in my mind I could still see the depressions in the eroded soil from when I carried her in my arms and laid her unresponsive body across the scattered grass. I buried my hands deep into the muddy bank and removed them, spreading the earth across my face and neck, trying to camouflage the man underneath. I began sobbing, held hostage by those seven or eight seconds where I wished she would have died. The burgeoning reddish sunrise bled into the water from the scaffolding and buildings, like oils falling from the edges of a mounted canvas.
    Water can grant you knowledge if you let it.
    No one ever told you what to do with it though.
    It was calm, but all the things that were placid and still were overshadowed by the inhumanity and senselessness in everything around me: the dead children, the innocuousness of the seemingly ashen landscapes and the marriage I had once valued. I looked down and tugged carelessly at the gold band around my finger.
    While other towns were reacting to the decline in the rural economy and traditional industry, my town was suffering the consequences of not being able to adapt: inevitable decay and entropy. Construction lights left on at the abandoned scrap metal development cast shadows around me and across portions of the river. A small launch passed slowly on the water, a few thin fishing lines hanging over the side. At the moment it passed, the small floodlight mounted on its front highlighted the silhouette of a lone figure standing at the far edge of the bridge, their arms folded over the railing, obscured by the shadows. The body paused slightly, hunched over as the launch passed, then rose and straightened their posture. Whoever it was seemed oblivious to my presence and my purpose in coming to the river.
    I stood on the dampness of the bank and unbuttoned my shirt, moving into the water ankle high. I welcomed the momentary cold sting. I closed my eyes and pushed through the bleak water, wishing the hopelessness and the rot would wash across my body and run away in the currents. The car Hannah had been traveling in with that man was still lifeless at the bottom