Carole King - "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"

I imagine a hundred thousand different situations. I imagine he died in a car crash, I go into gory detail. I imagine the shards ripping at his face, tugging on his mustache as he passes through the windshield. I think about him cheating on me. Picking up some girl, some whore, underage and strung-out, asking for cigarette money in the night street light. I think about them in an alley. And then to punish myself for thinking so negatively about him, I imagine him shot to death, after trying to retrieve an old woman's purse from a mugger, I see the images like panels in a comic. I open my eyes and the lights are still on. I try to remember what shirt he was wearing when he left. I can see four or five different ones, each as vivid as the other. I could get up and check which ones are here and eliminate, but that would be crazy. When I have to identify his body at the coroner's office it'll just be a shirt and it won't matter. Instead, I clean the house, cleaning things that are already clean. At this hour, I look four or five times at the coffee table, trying to decide if I can say 'clean' in my mind or if I need to keep looking at it. I finally turn the lights off and lie down. It's not long before the fist in my chest loosens and I fall asleep. And when I wake up it tightens right up and I get up. I hear the shower running. And there it is. A half-finished glass of red wine, fingerprinted in the 7am kitchen sun.

The shower is warm and giving and restful and smiling. I think there are still pears in the fridge for an omelette. [Buy]

Sunset Rubdown - "Coming To at Dawn"

"Opine," he thought, "opine". The flat grey wind gusted up the edges of his coat, "opine is not an imperative verb". The trees were leafless, not for long, "special treatment". A story about a child who adopts a piece of fruit as a kind of pet, a face in black marker, eyebrows over-thickened in attempt to have a change of mood. "Now it looks angry all the time," he, smiling, squinting, thought. [Buy]