Watched a couple passionately make out in front of the Randall’s on Westheimer today. I say passionately because I saw him put his hand behind her head as they kissed, a.k.a., the best move ever invented, something that should be bottled and sold. Ninety-seven degrees out on a day gray like a donkey’s back and they sat thigh to thigh at a picnic table next to a gently swaying sign that said You can prevent shingles. Actually, a sign can’t say anything, you have to read it. I learned that from a PBS show for kids about math, spoken (I think) by a ventriloquist’s dummy. Put a hand behind his head and his mouth will move. I watched this couple from the other side of the strip mall as I ate my plain frozen yogurt with chocolate chips – a boring order, I know, but the vastness of possible flavor and topping combinations stresses me out, mathematically. These two found each other so that has to count for something. It’s been so long for us, years since the humid night we met when you used the best move ever invented, that I worry you now find me boring, or insufferable. My voice in your mouth. Your kiss in my nerves. Sometimes we don’t say much at all and sometimes when I’m being insufferable you place your hand on the hollow of my back, the spot that sometimes itches that I can’t reach, and (I think) I can feel something dormant begin to stir.

 

 

Brooke Middlebrook grew up in the hills of western Massachusetts. She’s currently an MFA student in nonfiction at Bennington College and a reader for The Maine Review. Recent work appears in Fugue, The Cincinnati Review’s miCRo series, and Hunger Mountain.