Around and Around

Janice, asleep but restless in the heat, delivers a mule kick that bruises her husband’s shin. It is 4 a.m. Her husband Dale reaches down and rubs at the sharp edge of his shinbone, tenderly. He’ll be up the rest of the night, he realizes. He hums a little song to himself—a silly circular song he made up and sings for comfort during unpleasant times: This is the thin edge. Of the wedge. Soon. We’ll all be dead. Because. This is the thin edge. Of the wedge. He knows he should open the window to let some cool air in, but if he does, Shep, their German shepherd will bark at the cars crackling past on the gravel road. Janice will wake up and curse the dog. Also, the barking will probably wake up Ernst, next door. A light-sleeper, Ernst, and a Shep-hater. Ernst’ll get to his window and begin to bellow to beat the barking, waking the Williamses, the kids across the way who sleep with all their windows wide open. After her young husband, Jim, falls back asleep, the insomniac Mrs. Williams will leave their bed and head for the study, where the computer’s screen is filled with a rush of pixilated stars. Mrs. Williams will open up her instant messaging window, triggering a pre-set alarm that awakes IAmRufus69, with whom she’s been having a torrid electronic affair for several months. While Mrs. Williams, her nightgown bunched above her waist, masturbates to climax, miles away IAmRufus69 will copy the dispatches she sends him over the IM window and paste it into a series of boxes he’s laid out in a Word document. He’ll yawn a few broad, leonine yawns, wondering how he’s going to survive the extreme boredom of these encounters and get his thesis finished. Really who’s more pathetic: Her or me? he’ll ask himself. Around 4:30, the combination of Rufus’s typing and the plunk-plunk of incoming messages will awake his boyfriend Mike and cause Mike to unleash a series of quiet curses. He’ll rise out of bed with a groan and go to take a piss, wondering how he hooked up with someone so inconsiderate. He should have just adopted a dog. As he kisses Rufus on the bald crown of his computer blue-tinted head, Mike will make a mental note to call his older brother Dale later about that barky dog Dale’s always trying to give away.

Ah the hell with it, Dale thinks, and he throws open the window. Reliable Shep lifts his head and barks. Next door, Ernst opens his eyes and reaches toward the nightstand for his glasses as one foot slips the sheets, feeling in the dark for a cold slipper....