Morning Honey

When he’d dropped his cold egg salad into the switch, he lost a month’s work and developed a new strategy to bear the office. He replaced his twin mattress with a great Alaskan king so weekdays he could roll across, scoop the air, and whisper: morning honey to an imaginary wife. Then that month’s mistake becomes six; she gets pregnant with phantom triplets. Thin winter mornings and twenty red lights, but he can’t quit because those rascals wanna ski. They want some sort of a Mr. Gulch, and x-ray specs, plus he’ll surprise his goochy-goo with piano lessons. Then a client goes another direction. Morning honey, but she’s even less there than usual. Where’s our freaking mama? The three boys are holding empty doggy bowls and showing their ribs. Weekends are weekdays. A puppy adopted might die starved. Besides him, there is no living thing in the apartment, but he dutifully pantomimes silverfish in cups to be taken outside. She is always in the other room, tapping her foot. His tallest child has a child, so there are four, then five, then ten little riblets rattling bowls. They sing beautifully: poppy can’t, poppy poppy poppy can’t. He yells back: you rats! And he is afforded only the lowest raise. For the sake of his kids, he wonders how life can never relent. He must secure the future. Thus time is best in past chunks; he’s named Employee of the Decade, with a small bump. Here is what changes: the apples in their throats fall and they sing poorly now, near inaudible. That’s enough, and he takes a lone week to Amsterdam.

Bikes! Gnashing gears on the front of his calf, and the weight of a real human above. Goedemorgen, he says, what a golden sticky sweet canal! Loud American, she thinks. But, sorry for the crash, she offers a tour of the Keizersgracht. Life! The black pores of her nose surprise him, and he didn’t know sheets can hardly cover two. She batters him awake, interrupting his: morning with: stay? And the bowls ain’t right, and no tap tap because there are moments where it lets up and we see, yes, and we feel, yes, that this week was a week, and good enough for another, yes. Can he? No, he says, laughing finally. Next week is the Black Friday of telecom sales. Ernie’s in town. But one day, he imagines, he’ll tell his boys it gets better, and no, that won’t be a lie.