KATE ALLERT X
CHRISTINE H.
THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF COMMITMENT
Trina McClennan was dissatisfied – with life in general, and her love life in particular, despite the brace of satisfactory orgasms she’d enjoyed the night before, courtesy of the handsome chap asleep beside her. She liked Phil. He was a nice person with a nice body that he knew what to do with. Best of all, he didn’t want anything more than she did, which kept things simple. The trouble with simple, though, was that it got boring fast. And Trina had a very low boredom threshold. Their dalliance had kept her interested for all of three months. But this morning, when she woke, she knew it had palled. This was when introspection tended to kick in and she would ask herself why she couldn’t maintain a relationship for longer than a season. Then, she would imagine a life with the same partner long-term; a horrifying prospect that would compel her to end the current state of affairs, to focus on her work and friends, until the itch came back, strong enough to need scratching.
HEY YOU
Hey you. We finally meet. After 6 years and almost 2000 miles, here we are.
Strange that one of us tunneled his way from the West, though he came from the East. The dregs of Asia, they called him. Strange that the other, newly freed in the South, dug through from the East; his forebears ripped from the West African coast. Not our lands, yet our labors united them.
Not so strange though that, you and I, we’re not really here. One of us entombed in snow, alongside twelve hundred countrymen. The other, with countless others like him, dead from dirty water, whereabouts unknown.
And, no surprise at all, in the record of this momentous meeting, not one of us to be seen.
