Fran Furnivall - Shack-Ups!

They stumbled from bed to bath to the refrigerator and back to bed in a blur. The sheets had become caked and cracked with their come and they only barely noticed. Occasionally they would be aware of day lapsing into night for the curtains were drawn tight against the outside world. The sounds of the street would filter into the apartment like a shadowy intruder; a dog barking from some backyard, a cat wailing forlornly in the night, a fog horn belching a warning to all those ships that traveled darkened seas, carrying people away, bringing people back, cars squalling like undistinguished muzak in the background in the mind.

They didn't talk to each other, they murmured, they whispered. They told each other of faraway times and of lost days. Neon ghosts in a wilderness of tinsel and tacky bodies that had never come home. Of the way life could be-like it was now-forever if they only dared to work things out.

They fondled each other with as much passion in between the bouts of screaming ecstasy as they did at the threshold of orgasm. Nothing existed beyond those four walls. The phone would ring from time to time and Toni would yell for it to cease its crying, stop its demands upon her happiness, and it would.

"Lisa, Lisa, Lisa-", Toni said over and over again.

And Lisa stretched her long frame and replied, "I'm right here, I'm right here."

They made love until their bodies could no longer respond to the hunger of the heart and then they would topple into that black tunnel of oblivion, wrapped around each other, entwined in soul and body, snoring blissfully through lips bruised by love.

Tuesday

They said goodbye at the airport. "It's not really goodbye," Toni said looking at Lisa all blonde and brushed and shining in her brown suede suit. "It's just like they say in the movies, 'au revoir,' until we meet again and all that."

The androgynous computer voice announced the departure of flight four-o-one for Reno, Nevada and Lisa bent down to kiss Toni and whispered, "Of course it's not goodbye." And then she walked through the boarding gate turning once to wave. And then she was gone.