HERE’S 2 LOVERS

here´s 2 lovers: Adam and Janice

of Canadian citizenship.

A & J met in grade school and shared a table at lunch and occasionally shared lunch and every day hated their lunch. Adam´s mother packed sandwiches of both butter and peanut butter. Janice´s mother would pack Tupperware containers filled with roast beef, the juice of which would be filled with white chunks of you-know-what.

Every day they would eat this kind of $$$$ and they would look at each other and they would run and look at themselves and as grade school went on

they looked at things a lot Harder.

here´s Adam and Janice now: living in downtown Halifax he works for an Oxfam bookstore and she does some at-home-on-line business.

Here´s a bag of Chinese food: all covered in wet grease spots, like the bag is about to burst open from the soggy. Here´s them scooping it right up into their mouths with sour sauce dripping over them and over their fingers and onto their clothes and down onto the floor between their legs as they sit right on the floor, right on the bricks slopping it all up, all up and not talking and not even really thinking just basically filling and filling and filling until it hurts.

and then it hurts and it really hurts and then it´s right back to grade school and back to the mirrors and then their eyes are on one another so that each of them becomes the other´s mirror and it´s a dark picture indeed.

and then it hurts.

here´s them: A & J lay empty kissing half naked and bone coated on the bed, all Listerine on their lips and like, lo: happy to be together. Happy to be in capital L, Love.

(Frank Hinton lives in Halifax where she teaches and writes. She edits the daily fiction journal metazen. She´s okay with herself.)