Oliver Benjamin
admitted. He wondered how he managed to say something so trite.
He worshipped the poetic, but was himself no poet.
“It was. It is,” she said. “You’ve given me a wonderful new world
to live in. But every day is a little world. A little life, a little death
even.”
“But aren’t they just a little bit connected?”
“If I connected it,” she confessed, “It would be too big for me to
handle.”
Roy breathed deeply, trying to untangle the knotted viscera in his
chest. “I guess that’s what people mean when they say live in the
moment. But I can’t do that. Origins and destinations have meaning
for me. Life isn’t just moments and events. It’s currents. Rivers. A
stream. Moments are like photographs. Beautiful but dead.”
She took his hand.
“I know this sounds insane,” Roy confessed, “but I think I love
you.”
“That’s not insane.”
“The insane part is I thought you loved me.”
“I do,” she said. “You’re amazing.”
He turned towards her, hands out in front of him. “Then how
could you go off with Niles?”
She performed a strange gesture then, like a blind woman feeling
her way around an unfamiliar room, probing and imagining. “I
started to love him too,” was her best guess. “I forgot that was
wrong.”
“It’s not wrong,” Roy quickly said. But he felt in his heart that it
was. He couldn’t say why. Anyway, he wanted it to be wrong.
“I don’t want you to hurt, Roy,” she said, standing up. He
watched her walk away from him.
So this was it. The love that he thought would save him was
slipping away like a satisfied cat.
That famous incident with that old lady at McDonald’s: Sitting in
the drive-thru, she had placed a hot coffee between her legs. When
the car moved, it spilled and irreparably scorched her genitalia. She
sued McDonald’s for a million dollars and won. They had failed to
adequately warn her that coffee was hot.
Roy had not been in a fast food restaurant for years, but he
remembered that McDonald’s coffee cups always sported the same
curious admonition: “Caution: Hot.” He had believed it wildly
unnecessary at the time. Now, watching Sprout walk away from him,
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