BooksBarbecue
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Chapters (32)
  1. Cover
  2. PART ONE
  3. 1
  4. 2
  5. 3
  6. 4
  7. 5
  8. 6
  9. 7
  10. 8
  11. 9
  12. 10
  13. 11
  14. 12
  15. 13
  16. 14
  17. PART TWO
  18. 1
  19. 2
  20. 3
  21. 4
  22. 5
  23. 6
  24. 7
  25. 8
  26. 9
  27. 10
  28. AFTERWORD
  29. 1
  30. 2
  31. 3
  32. 4

He tried balancing his schedule. Mornings at the office, her apartment at night, occasional daytime excursions, the long lonely walks that kept him company like a friend. In fact, his desire to balance his two worlds was not financially motivated—Sherine gave him his office salary many times over—it was because he didn’t want her to possess him completely. His inability to sing in front of anyone else didn’t leave him with many options. Just as a man can’t be his own judge and jury, no artist can work with an audience of one. This peculiar situation was, he sensed, the world’s final and most inexcusable insult. Yet he also knew that he would never find the strength to walk away from the intimacy offered him by a woman who hadn’t ever come to visit him, not even in his dreams.

His dreams, with their endless, monotone variations on melancholy. Recently, though, a new one had been added to the roster:

He was sitting in a reception room. It was unfamiliar to him, yet he knew that it was somewhere in Sherine’s apartment. There was this tiny cat, soft and black, twisting over and around him on the sofa where he sat. He’d push the cat away, but it would climb back up, stalking along the backrest behind him, or pouncing on his bare feet, scratching them. The maid would come and take the cat away, but in no time there it would be again: the cat’s hiss at his ear, its claws at his neck, and in the hiss, the sound of his favorite song on an endless loop.

4

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THE SILENT TEAM – OR – A COG IN THE MACHINE

They had no regular schedule. They would come at any time, ball in hand, and sit in a line at the edge of the field—a dirt plot yet to host a building—following the game being played without a single cheer or comment. Then, when it was over, they would rise as one man and drift over the sidelines to face the winners.

The system was that the winning team stayed on and got to say who’d they’d play next, unless—which was more often the case with the silent team—there was no one waiting to play. And when no one was waiting, and when they’d beaten the previous winners—and this team always beat the previous winners—they would split into two smaller teams and play each other for an hour or so before going home.