On the TV, mounted on the wall, California was still burning.

“Let’s get married,” Harry said.

“What?” I had taken a bite too quickly, and scalded my mouth, and so sat there with my tongue hanging out a little. Harry’s hair was limp around her face. Another thing that gave her a hungry look, as so many things did. There was a purple streak of pie filling on her cheek, and she was still holding her fork in midair. It dropped crumbs when her hand shook.

“Let’s get married,” said my ex-girlfriend who had never been my girlfriend. “Let’s have kids. Let’s go to Italy and France and Spain. Let’s fuck a lot. Let’s—” She put her fork down. “Let’s have a lot of kids. Let’s live in a cabin, with a lot of kids and a dog and—”

“Let’s eat pie,” I agreed. I think I was smiling, because my mouth hurt.

“Every day.”

The difference between a Shakespearean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy is whether there’s a marriage at the end. Here whatever has come before is answered with love, which means sex, which means children. Let’s fuck and be plentiful. That’s how you send death out of the room for a while.

“You’re beautiful,” Harry said, looking at me very intensely, like she wanted to swallow me into the centers of her eyes. But her gaze also kept flicking away, toward that television. I touched her cold hand, briefly, with mine, and she put another bite of pie in her mouth.

“Is it burning anywhere important?” I asked. I’d sat so I could see her and the window and the mountains outside, but not the TV.

“No.” She licked the huckleberry filling from the corner of her mouth. “Just by my old elementary school.”

I felt so tired, tingling like a limb after the blood has rushed back into it. Harry rubbed her face, her pinkish eyes. She’d put on makeup in the morning, I guess for an imaginary camera or the eyes of God or maybe for me. It was smeared everywhere now. “Let’s get married,” she said once more.

She was mostly done with her slice of pie. I’d only eaten about half of mine, but I slid the plate across the table to her. Harry took it delicately, without touching my hand.

Outside the window, the trees bent in a high wind, right down to the ground.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments