“Yeah, that was some line,” I tell her over coffee after the reading. “Awfully literary...well, Biblical at any rate, and dramatic.”

“But did you like it?” she pushes, her eyes no longer softened by candle light and curls of incense, her jaw set hard as if braced for assault.

I stare at the paper again, as if somehow the words will rearrange themselves into some meaningful equation. In my dream I wake up... So what? I think. “Yeah, it’s okay. It’s fine. But Chris, you know, not everyone in the world is haunted with guilt for something they did fifteen years ago.”

“It’s not exactly guilt...” she begins.

“Of course it is. You had an abortion when you were seventeen years old and you’ve never gotten over it.”

Her face crumbles as it always does when I tell her the truth, which makes me all the more aggressive. “And furthermore, not only are you plagued by this thing, but you insist on whining about it in public.”

“Whining?”

“You really have it made, lassie,” I continue, glancing over the room in preparation for my finale, “Your own coffee house twice a month, courtesy of your independently wealthy girlfriend, and all the weepy females she can pack in. What does she do? Pay them?”

“That’s enough!” she hisses, kicking back her chair.

“Yes, it is,” I agree, shoving her notebook back across the table and standing up. “Sit down and finish your coffee. I have to go anyway.”

It’s the same every time, I mutter, once out on the sidewalk. Fight or flight. Or make that fight AND flight. Picking a fight gives me an excuse to leave.

ãElizabeth Terry
5/1/96