I poured a lot of vodka into her cough medicine,...

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

I poured a lot of vodka into her cough medicine, in a pint glass, and we sat in her kitchen and sipped from the same glass, talking to each other with little impatience for anything, just watching news reports on a small television set with the sound turned off as the hands on the clock climbed and climbed and we talked over the silent news. It just kept getting later and later, but eventually we felt drowsy and then sat on the couch for a while and that’s the last thing I remember. A dream I had that night was that I was on a fishing expedition to find a golden whale. And we were being interviewed for a film documentary on the expedition. At one point some of the cameras were lost overboard to the sea during an epic storm, so after that the rest of the interviews were done indoors because the storm was still going on; on camera we had to discuss what was going outside since the film crew were worried about having their equipment on the deck and so couldn’t be out there to film it themselves, and so what happened was, everybody on the entire ship was inside the main cabin, being interviewed, and in my dream I could see the ship from outside, a wide camera view of the ship from above, and the camera panned the black, roiling sea as the entire crew were inside, and there was the golden whale, circling our boat unbeknownst to us as we were all inside the cabin. When I woke up, she was still on the couch beside me and it was hours past what we had set the alarm clock for. I looked at the alarm clock awkwardly then realized what I was looking at in particular; it was set wrong, for PM not AM. So we both missed the bus to work. Just then the telephone in the kitchen started ringing and I knew that must be our boss, wondering where she was. At my place, the phone was probably ringing there too. Or would be presently.