FOTO-FICTION OF THE DAY

Sympatico

                “She loved me,” Grundy said.  “I know she did.  She said it.”

                “I know, man,” Winston replied.  “They always say it.”
                The sun had risen ankle high in the east and from the treetops the birds had begun scolding those below.
                “She’ll be there tomorrow.  I know she will.”
                “That’s the way to be, brother.  But it is tomorrow.  You mean tonight?”
                “Tonight, tomorrow, next week, she’ll be there, man.”
                A tall thin man walking a daschund appeared, parting them like Moses and the Red Sea.
                “Fucker,” Grundy muttered.
                “My ex-boss’s wife had a dog like that.  Took it everywhere.”
                “They do that, man.”
                “I know they do.”
                Both felt off balance as they humped over the sidewalk in the already oppressive Louisiana heat, but they’d already sweated so much, every molecule of fluid drained from their exhausted bodies, they had nothing left to give.  Car horns began bleating and delivery trucks groaned and wobbled along the narrow streets.  The sibilant roar of the street cleaners rose over the French Quarter as they flushed out the refuse of the preceding day and night.
                “You got any?” said Grundy, as if struck by a wondrous inspiration.
                Winston moaned, a low-pitched drawn-out lamentation, agonized and lugubrious.
                “My back, man,” he said.
                “I know,” Grundy commisserated, “mine too.”
                “There’s one!”
                Grundy looked up and his face, slowly and warily, gave birth to a grin.
                “I know it’s open too,” he said.
                Less than a minute later, they were wedged into the narrow doorway, face-to-face with their front faces, breathing stale morning breath upon one another as they struggled to thread that tight needle, their back faces looking in opposite directions, grinding against the door jambs, and during that moment they appeared to those on the outside as a single grotesque creature—the Janus of Carondelet—as the bartender inside Hobnobber’s Variety Bar leaned on his counter, sucking a wooden match, and watched to see who would be first to reach a stool.

D. E. Sievers