There was a boy who loved a girl. She said funny things about the stars and sea and cared too much and smiled too much. She wore dresses made of green and yellow polka-dots, sometimes jeans, sometimes lipstick was all she wanted to wear. She cut her earth-brown hair far too short. She claimed it helped her think. She would scrunch her nose and stick her tongue out when she was angry, she would raise her arms above her head and spin when she was happy. She would go out and sit on the sidewalk on the rainy days and would stay inside on sunny days and watch the light fall through the leaves of summer trees or make diamonds and silver shavings of the fallen snow and icicle spears. She said the stars smelt of ink and laundry detergent and the sea was in love with the moon, that’s why it was always running away from it. She called herself Winnipeg.
The boy wore black pants and white collared shirts. His blond hair was tamed and slept on his scalp under a blanket of plaster. He smiled with his pretty eyes. When his teeth showed themselves in mirth she laughed at their perfection and he hid them again.
The boy went to a school made of brick, black and ideas. He copied down numbers and reasons and thrust fistfuls of correct answers down his own throat and never thought to choke. He was a very good boy. His name was James. James showed Winnipeg the paper cuts in his mouth and she glued them shut. He showed her his pockets full of smudged and wet numbers and she made them into black butterflies. She wiped her stained fingers on his white collared shirt, drawing smiling faces over his heart.
They loved each other, these two. But one day he said goodbye. He told her that the black and brick school was sending him to the black and brick city to work and Winnie didn’t belong there. She promised to wear black and white and carry wet, inky numbers in her pockets if only he would take her with him. He stained his cheeks with her tears. He told her no. He kissed her goodbye. The kiss was colored like hot stain onto his mouth.
The people in the city where he worked smelled of secrets and sleeping pills. Each day James went to work, dragged by his small tie and double-knotted shoelaces into a grey cubicle and sat there next to the other coughing workers that spit paperwork in time with their heartbeats. A new lady caught his attention. She wore black and white, she had sewed the inky numbers lovingly to her face. Her heels seemed always around the corner, click-clack-click-clack-click-clack. The stained kiss on his lips itched him. When it rained he would run outside and open his mouth. The water tasted like soot. He learned to stay inside. Click-clack. There were no stars. The street lamps, neon signs and road work lamps stood proudly and believed they were the stars. No one questioned them. Click-clack. He washed all the smiling faces off of his white shirts. He knew the sea was never in love with the moon he claimed he could prove it with the numbers in his pockets. He soon forgot Winnipeg. The memories of her polkadots and lipstick and spiky brown hair were buried beneath piles of paper, chained with paperclips inside file cabinets and deposited in the thin arms of the woman who clicked and clacked always. He lived and worked and cried and that was all. The clock was his mistress now. The kiss stopped itching. Winnipeg wasn’t her name anyways.
Coffee and Cellos 