29. #Late, February 2018

Mike crawled out of the couch's embrace. His knees cracked, his back and neck threatened to never move again. The game controller fell to the floor, but he didn't stoop to pick it up. I'll never do this again for as long as I shall live.

He was a tin man without lube and without heart, rusting away deep in the forest. That's what a night of killing and mutilating teens does to someone on the wrong side of twenty-five. A wince crept on his face: he was not winning at it exactly. The kids had better reflexes, better gear, and garbage mouths. Old age and treachery could only go so far to counter that.

Never again.

If he had the energy, he could have showered and dressed in time for work, but he was so drained that he just bumped into furniture crossing from room to room, picking things up, dropping them, forgetting what he was up to.

The thought of pulling the sweater off and confronting the bloat dropped him onto his bed for a good five minutes, exhausted. He squeezed his dry, overstrained eyes shut, counting to ten. He'll live. He won't enjoy it for the next little while, but he'll live.

About the only productive task he had accomplished was brushing his teeth.

***

Carol intercepted him at the entrance to the library. "You're fifteen minutes late, Michael. And it wasn't because you spent too much time on making yourself presentable."

Mike dug his fingernails into the unshaven cheek. "I'm sorry. Daya's left. It won't happen again."

Carol slipped into the commander-in-chief mode. "You're on the sorting duty today. Find Alyssa in the dungeon, send her upstairs. I wanted to train her to man the front desk regardless. Unless you're here to ask for personal time off?"

Mike shook his head mournfully. "No point. She's left left. To Ontario. I don't have the address, and she won't reply to my texts."

"Well." Carol knitted her brows together. "Sorting duty it is. And quickly, quickly, before the visitors decide I run a funeral home, not a public library."

"Thank you. I'll be all right tomorrow."

Carol harrumphed. "We'll see. Off with you. I'll call Alyssa to warn her to expect a fellow employee before she sees your mine and dials 911."

Mike managed a chuckle. The mirror didn't flatter him, but it didn't reflect a dangerous reprobate back at him either. Just a worn visage with sad bags under reddened eyes, exactly what you would expect after a sleepless night. "You have my word, Carol. I'll be on time tomorrow and presentable."

The staff nicknamed the sub-level where the books dropped down from the return shoots a dungeon for obvious reasons. It was also where they brought in the books trucked in from the other library branches. The job was to sort through the piles, place the books on the carts to go back on the shelves, or into the color-coded plastic crates for return to their home branches.

If one didn't mind the absence of windows—and Mike didn't want windows with their bright light and the view of Daya's Hill—the dungeon was the coziest place in the building, dry and warm, with the calming buzz of the halogen lamps overhead and books, books everywhere. They spilled from the shoot's apron, peeked out of their crates, and shifted precariously whenever one moved a filled cart.

In the middle of this organized and beautiful chaos, Mike found a bony maiden. She had one sandy strand pinned with a stubby pencil. The rest of them ran wild from under a moss-green velvet headband and onto a fitted top with a Death Note character. She was checking off the slips on the holds against the list with another pencil. The third one was sticking out of the back pocket of her crushed velvet skirt.

"Alyssa? Hey! I'm Mike. I'm swapping the shift with you."

"Nice to meet you." She pushed the list and the pencil into his hands. The accent was Québécois. "Those crates are next, and thanks for rescuing me from the dungeon. Not my favorite shift, ouch, so empty here, no people. Do you want me to come help later if it's quiet upstairs? No? You aren't sick, are you? Because if you're sick, you should go home, forcing yourself to go to work sick, it's the worst thing you could do. The body demands rest and recuperation."

"I'm fine," Mike inserted into a minuscule pause. "Just had a bad night's sleep." And got wrecked by some kids from Singapore.

"Did you try lavender or marjoram oil on your pillow? It's amazing, and completely natural."

A testy reply hung on the tip of his tongue—about lotus seeds and strong alcohol being what he needed far more than lavender—but he forced himself to smile. It wasn't her fault that Daya had left... "Thanks for the tip, Alyssa. You better go before Carol loses her patience."

***

Given the astronomical calorie count in Doritos alone that he had consumed the night before, Mike felt resentful when his stomach growled at lunchtime: he was already moving at half-speed, so getting hazy because he didn't have Daya to pack his lunch would be just the perfect conclusion to this marvelous day.

To add insult to injury, he did not remember how the things he had craved so badly tasted.

Oh, he knew perfectly well how they tasted.

The red flavor ignited the mouth and nostrils that inhaled it. The saltiness balanced precariously on the tightrope, but did not tip over to the pit of the unpleasant. The crunch — and he would argue to death that the dry crunch of chips was a flavor—energized the palate. He missed this crunch the most during the fast-food prohibition, and no carrot ever came close.

But he knew it all from his previous experiences.

Last night, his lips, his tongue, his nose went all numb. It could have been some post apocalyptic machine grinding through food, not his mouth for all it did for him. There was no pleasure in it, no comfort, nothing, nothing...

He wished he could at least feel guilty... but no, nothing.

"You're a pathetic fat idiot in love with the wrong girl," he told himself. And his inner self shrugged shoulders in an apathetic, so what? This miracle of self-acceptance did not empower him.

The only thing he wanted was to curl on top of the books like the mighty bookwyrm he was, and snooze.

Instead, he left the dungeon, stared in a masochistic stupor at Daya's favorite hill out of the library's floor-to-ceiling window: it looked deserted. You and I, bud, you and I. He sighed and made a beeline for the vending machine.

The small bags of chips behind the glass caused him to groan inwardly, and he had no use for the styrofoam in syrup aka health bars. Finally, he got a bag of sour gummy frogs, in acidic colors. The wrapper promised they would blast the eyeballs right out of his skull, which, if true, should complete his transformation to a zombie.

The hand of fate so had it that the candy machines stood between the viewing windows onto the ice rink. Don't look, Mike ordered himself... and looked.

It was public skate time, the stay-at-home moms' special. The rink was full of toddlers zipping around with more speed than control. Packed into snow pants and jackets, the brats bounced off the boards and plunged helmet first into the lightning-fast slides across the arena.

Kids didn't hold Mike's attention. Among all the small fry and moms, he spotted two teens who should have been in school, and weren't.

The gal was leggy and had a bouncy pony-tail. She brought along a skinny whip of a boy. Mike could not see his skates from his perch, but he figured they were much like Daya's. He wore the same Skate Canada zipped top that Daya had in her Black and Zipped collection, and moved... well, if not exactly like her, taking off with every stride, but sort of like her.

He kept his hand wrapped around the Pony-Tail's waistline, making sure she moved along. While cautious, she did not trip every second like someone Mike saw in the mirror.

Satisfied that his girl was moving under her own power, the boy cut around her in circles, eyes on the target. She laughed, and he swirled her. A few more loops around the arena, and the young couple ended up closer to the milling middle of the rink.

Once there, the Pony Tail took on the role of a beacon, while the boy showed off.

Mike recognized the sitting spin Daya did, though in his esteemed opinion it lacked speed. Probably sufficiently warmed up by then, the kid repeated the same jump a few times. A double flip, maybe, but he wouldn't have staked his money on it. He might have appreciated the display more than the Pony Tail. But the kid was wiser than his years suggested, so he gave it a rest, and pulled the girl along into another breathless spin.

Mike sighed: he was cheering for a kid half his age who got things right, but ouch, was he once a millstone around Daya's neck when they had gone skating together.

"Oh, those are crazy good!" said a happy voice behind him.

Mike turned and squinted in panic, trying to remember the name of the new girl. "Yes, they're fun, ah... Alice."

"Alyssa, rhymes with Liza, not lice," the girl corrected, and went on, "life's short, eat dessert first, yes? I get it, it is such an important thing to listen to the signals your body sends you. Like there are weeks when I am completely going raw vegan, and I want nothing else. And then one day all I want is... fried liver..."

With all the agility of a snail caught in amber, Mike realized that Alyssa's speech concerned his sour frogs, rather than Romeo on the ice. He crinkled the sealed bag in his hand and crab-walked around the viewing bench to shield the arena from Alyssa. They shared the workplace, and she caught him doing candy for lunch like a freshman. Fine... But the young lovers, the skating blues, let alone that he was sweet on a girl who dumped him, those were his secrets to guard as jealously as it pleased him.

"Do you want the candy?" He extended the frogs. "I don't think I shall eat it."

"Oh, no, no, I didn't mean to..." She waved her arms in the air as if his words were horseflies. Her cheeks colored pink, from the exertion of denial or the embarrassment of the conversation taking a turn she did not want, he could not say. "You enjoy your lunch, Mike, and I already had mine, panini in Jugo Juice, it's really, really good."

Mike tossed the bag into the waist-high plastic trash can. With a thud, the very best in the artificial flavorings and colorants went down the hole. For once in his life, he hit his mark. "Nah. It will just spoil my appetite for dinner."

"What's for dinner?" Alyssa said without missing a beat, the pink still blooming on her face.

A lone guy's bolognaise, he wanted to say. "Bolognaise."

"That sounds nice! What do you put in it?"

"Celery," Mike said. "Lots and lots of celery."

Alyssa stared at him in bewilderment. "Is it a veggie version? Are you a vegetarian then?"

Mike started to laugh. "No, no, I eat meat. Don't worry about it, just a personal quirk." How many people craved a vegetable because it reminded them of their lover?

***

The vegetables had fewer problems surviving abandonment than he did. They were as crisp as the day Daya's hand had placed them in his fridge.

For a few minutes, he did the thing that used to drive his mother mad, hanging on to the fridge door, looking inside. Then he breathed out and took the plunge: letting the produce rot would not bring Daya back. Would anything?

One by one he extracted carrots, celery, and the mushrooms from the cold depths and tossed them in the sink.

On the stove, bacon and onions crackled merrily, perfuming the apartment with the smoky umami scent. He licked off whatever was sticking to the mixing spoon. Ground beef and lamb joined in, along with pepper and cumin. At that point, he wished he could just eat it with his spoon, but he endured the hunger pangs for the sake of long-term gain.

Some veggies, some cans of diced tomatoes—and the sauce came together. He left it bubbling next to the cutting board with chopped basil and parsley waiting for their turn... and faced two hours of waiting.

There was nothing for it. Now was as good as ever. He plucked the books from the over-inflated mountain of the empty chips bags. The infernal things spread out, dusting everything with orange powder and yellow crumbs. He knelt by the coffee table, packing the garbage into the trash can, sprayed, wiped and vacuumed the debacle away with the dedication of an android.

When the glass top shined, and half the basil got mixed into the sauce, Mike dragged the table to the spare bedroom.

He brought the LEGO tub over, but after setting the base, he just sat on the floor, letting the plastic pieces run through his fingers. The smell of cinnamon and flowers lingered in the room. It should have been overpowered by the fried onions, but his nose picked it, or his mind imagined it. Either way, it lingered. Daya lingered.

The timer buzzed, turning his thoughts back to food. The lone guy's Bolognaise—it was just like bolognaise, only it lasted a week. Or, in his case, two days.

No, it would last a week, he promised himself after he had returned to the kitchen and ladled two cups of the meat sauce over spinach. Two cups exactly... over spinach.

Using the weeds instead of pasta felt like a betrayal of the proud Danioni bloodline. It pleased him, for even petty vengeance was still vengeance. What was it that his mother had told him? That it would not work out between Daya and him because of the drastic differences in their lifestyle? Well, duh.

He took a sip of the red wine he cooked with. It would please mother that she was right... and he would chew spinach instead of rigatoni.

A ziplock baggie with torn paper still sat in the middle of the counter. He picked it up, then replaced it. It didn't belong in the trash, or at least he hoped so. It was a promise, Daya's promise to figure things out... and his as well.

I'll make it work. I don't know how yet, besides eating spinach, but I will.