Mair Allen

A Prologue in Ice

Start with the photo of us standing behind the well of the bar: Start with her slipping one silver cylinder into another; shaking and pouring the once disparate spirits and ice into a top heavy glass. I rip the garnish, bright bitter skin of grapefruit, twist it over the pink surface; the spinel in my ring shifts from blue to gray in the low light. We work like this for years. Waiting to touch. Over these glasses we find breaths in the press of bodies.

When those breaths become gasps—and when they become sobs—it’s hard to say.

Under a sky before a storm, the same gray as her bed sheets, I dream of her body pressed against another body: nearly smash against the concrete freeway barriers. This person a new category of storm. The weather always changing.

What do you want from this anyway? We melt the question between our hot hands. Anxious to see what answer is frozen in the middle; afraid the answer is—obviously—nothing. Maybe once it’s gone it’s gone.

She marks the fluid nature of all relationships as I flow downstream. It’s possible having started with a glacier we would have still schismed sheets of ourselves into the ocean. Will anything survive this climate?

Love, for me, has been the habit of erasing the edges of myself. Taking the pink end of the pencil and roughing it against the one photograph of us I have, I think I am softening my features, opening a blank space of possibility where my heart should be, but when I look down hers is the figure no longer in the picture.

I put the photo in a zip-loc bag filled with water. Leave it in the back of the freezer. It sits next to a slice of wedding cake, some questionable acid, ice-burned green peas.

It’s snowing outside and there’s something I forgot.