“You look so hot right now, Jen. Oy vey! I’ll talk to you later. Bye.” It was just like him, embarrassed and hurried and childishly unsentimental. Making some gesture but not knowing how to finish it.

She saved the message though, and listened to it one more time as the teakettle began to whimper on the hot coils. It was strange how David’s words had waited for her like that, how they had been preserved in the telephone like actual objects with weight and texture. Like colored stones, she thought, stored in a metal box, hidden in an office building on the edge of some highway.

Jen poured the hot water into her cup and sat down at the table, watching the steam curl and disappear. The room was motionless, lit weakly by the yellow glow of a corner streetlight, and when the hum of the refrigerator stopped, everything became silent. The silence crackled on her eardrums.

Jen breathed shallowly as the silence shaped itself to the drying rack and the chairs, the narrow gap between the wall and the oven. When the whole room was filled with silence, and the tea had become strong enough, Jen lifted her cup and pressed its warm, hard skin to her cheek. Outside, a car was passing, and its lights swept through her garden and then were gone.

Young Bodies

YOUNG BODIES

“I’M NOT SAYING you did it,” Roy said. “I’m just telling you what Nathan thinks.”

“I didn’t do it,” Kendra said. “He thinks I’m stupid. That’s really what he’s saying.”

“I’m just giving you a heads-up is all.”

Kendra Orlov stared at the paneled ceiling above her head. In the far corner of her bedroom a water stain the shape of Texas glared down at her. She was not happy. Moments earlier, her coworker Roy had called to inform her that the till at Express had come up short, and their manager, Nathan, assumed she was responsible. She was doing her very best to register her shock and disgust with some restraint.

“Is he around right now?” she wanted to know.

“In and out. You know how it is.”

“God, what does he fucking do all day? No one knows.”

“Okay. Well. You want me to say anything or what?”

“No,” Kendra said. She tilted her head to keep the signal from breaking up. Across the street a crow landed on the back of a blue pickup truck with an awkward flapping of wings. “I’ll come by later. I’ll deal with it.”

Kendra snapped the phone shut. She lay still and gazed at a brittle poster of Red Square at dusk, a gift from her father eight years before, and the last vestige of her childhood décor. Her teenage décor was barren walls. They were pale yellow, with an agitating fracture near the window. The sound of her mother vacuuming in the other room was another aggravation.