Excerpt from "Entropy"

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This became one of those harrowing nights wherein they behaved in almost exactly the way that they always had because neither could imagine an action between themselves that did not fit the proscription of their ritual everydayness—despite his betrayal. Lying together in the dark, he held her from behind with his arms around her slender ribs beside her bare breasts that slid toward the mattress like fleshy droplets of water. His breathing unconsciously fell into a rhythm with hers so that his belly pressed into the small of her back as her exhalation drew it minutely away. Only the gravity of shared years held this charade in its slow orbit.

“If the universe dies a cold death,” he began at length, speaking quietly into her dark mass of hair where practice told him that her ear would be found, “then let us be the last two little entangled particles.”

A derisive snort interrupted her steadied inhalations momentarily as she made a small effort to move away. Without stopping her, predicting her ultimate decision, he allowed her finally to press harder against him and simultaneously curl a little into herself. She began sobbing again as her brain labored to fit his words into their constellation of memory and emotion. Sharp sniffs peppered her crying spell so that the outstanding vertebrae of her fetally curved spine occasionally jabbed into his sternum and reverberated inside him with a pain that he recognized immediately as heartbreak. A certain resonance was struck up between them. At length she quieted, wetted her lips noisily, wiped the tears from her round, bronze cheeks, and cleared her throat. She had maneuvered the blankets by grades away from him with a defiant spirit of attrition, wrapped by then tightly around her lower body, and he shivered in the cold room unwilling to break the hours of pure feeling over bodily concerns.

“And if it is a heat death?” Her dry and unexpected response streaked suddenly out of an unknowable span of empty time.

He did not have an immediate reply and folded inward. Having failed at tact long ago to extract himself from the uncomfortable web of wrongdoing, white lies, and gentle-if-misplaced admonishments for the sake of misdirection, his shell of dust and ices melted away into semi-poetic reminiscences, vague half-promises, and fantastically romantic visions paired exactly to a future that they had consciously engaged in rejecting. On such a journey of discovery only incongruent memories and two coincidental one-sided loves managed to surface.

He had imagined that the way his skin sometimes stuck to hers as the passionate heat of formation radiated away proved the closeness and mutability of all things, but over the long life of the universe such pools of stuff must have grown irreparably disparate. He searched for what was lost there between them in the magic that had appeared on occasion: a star falling over the canopy of the ancient tree where they first kissed on a hot night under Virgo or floating together listlessly over a city in the shallows of a cerulean sea where the brilliant fish flitted by urchins like asteroids through a belt of black stars or a sun setting through the haze of sea foam and mist watched from the edge of a cliff in a green land of dreams, gazing ever West. His world was punctuated by a personal morality, mystic cosmologies, and a primordial metaphysics; to her it was only some dust burning up in the dark or a reef nestled in dirty cinderblocks threatening to tear them apart as the tide went out or another annoying stop delaying her voyage of self-actualization. She pursued the mundane with fanaticism.

Frustrated to the end by this difficult love, he wrested back with a jerk his share of the covers. He released her. Rolling away to face the wall, unseen for the darkness—another unknowable sky, another invisible horizon—he let their bodies touch at the butt and the pads of their feet as they had so many times before out of affection. This time though he resolved to let her know only his dirtiest parts.

“If it is a heat death,” he said evenly, “then I will hold myself apart and stand on the pandemonium brink as the sole bastion of life and dynamism, and fuck you for asking.”

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