The Flesh

As a couple, I admit, they had me transfixed. They were so alike in everything, with their skin still intact, side by side, under our dining room table, close enough to each other to reach out to each other if they had not been all encumbered because of what they were in actuality—slices of cucumber. I scooped them up.

What is missing here is what I did then with them.

That’s when all our company came in, our friends and our relatives, not all of them all together, but the stream of their entering our house began.

I was hearing myself say sometimes, and I’m afraid I don’t know and yes, I do hope and think of me. My friend R. exclaimed “Cliff!” Then C. said in a some­what louder voice than R.’s, “No doubt he will come.”

Plenty has been missing here all along, in addition to most of the people’s names in their entirety, more of what they were saying, also the overtones and the un­dertones of their major statements.

Later, when everybody had said their good-byes, I told C. that it had all been like a dream—dinner and so on.

He said, “Tomorrow is another day.”

I didn’t mean for what I had said to make such a muffish sound, from where there was nowhere further naturally to bounce.

This happens, though, to what gets eaten up. That’s all my fault Betty McDonald is a doornail.