Pegasus2001

Tiene Fuego?
Teresa Yoon Kyong Kim
Second Place, Prose
Duluth High School

Afraid to lose my manhood at the fruit counters, I stand outside the grocery store reading some Somerset Maugham--a man after my own heart.
        The haze from my cigarette breath climbs to join the gray night billow above as I take a look at my watch. Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes since she went in to "pick up a little something for tonight." A man, perhaps? Which would actually be preferable to me: somehow it would make everything better if I could blame her for what the last four uneventful years of our sedate marriage have made me realize and, unfairly, have been stopping me from saying. Plus, she is such a simple creature. I could never make her understand, so it would be much easier on both of us for me to just say, Oh...never mind--for me to wait out here night after night to help carry the groceries back to the apartment, hoping she'll walk out one day with a man.
        There's nothing quite so dismal in the world as to say, Oh...never mind--hope forsaken. Oh...never mind. Oh, I don't have the energy to explain anymore. Oh...never mind. Oh, I don't  know how much longer I can go on this way. Oh...never mind. Oh, forget it. Oh, forget it all. Oh...forget me. Forget you.
        I stop pitying myself as a hand holding a cigarette of expression disrupts my view of the empty sidewalk. A young man's eyes glitter in the darkness. He is well built with a strong and handsome jawbone--and Adonis in every sense of the word. That can only mean he is very ugly: beautiful night folk are so often disappointing in a mere twelve hours.
        " Tiene fuego?"* He wants to know if I have fire.    
        I look once more into his glittering eyes. Charlotte is also very attractive at night. I had first met her at night. A thin, tall creature, she was a nymph peering curiously and surreptitiously over the ledge of a bridge as I neared her.
        "What are you doing?" I had asked.
        "I'm just staring at the water. How sweet the moonlight sleeps  upon this bank!"
        "Oh," I'd said, enamored by her poesy. Then when I'd taken her for some coffee and discovered she was, both by hobby and vocation, a painter, her romanticism was sealed. I asked her to marry me on the spot and she accepted.        
        Our first anniversary was the birth of my depression. As we ate dinner by the river, she'd sighed, "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!"
        "You said that  the first night I met you," I'd remarked as I poured her some wine.
        "Oh, yes," she'd replied, grinding her knife into the tender heart of her marinated salmon.  "I often say it. Shakespeare really is wonderful." My heart lay in pieces.
        Every day since then, I was reminded of the staleness of our marriage. The first year had been all right enough. It had been like peeling an onion, layer by layer. I wrote my first book of poetry that year and dedicated it to my wife. But after it had been published, I'd discovered that I had peeled the entire onion, and unlike the others, my onion had left no core in my hand. All that was left was an empty tear. Every night, the same mundane script as I returned home. No muse to light my creative hearth. No wife to understand my pain. But the dishes were always clean, the laundry was always done, and wonderfully crafted copies of Cezanne's Still Life with Apples and Peaches and Van Gogh's Starry Night hung about the apartment.
        Tonight, the only stars are in the eyes of young Adonis, and again he wants to know if I have fire.
        "No. I'm sorry, senor," I say, as my wife comes out holding a few manless grocery bags.
        She gives me a worried look. "Honey, are you all right?" The words leave her with genuine concern but clang hollowly in my ears.
        "I'm fine."
        She hugs me and sings, "Don't worry, be happy." She pauses to smile. "Are you happy, dear?"
        The exquisite release: "I'm as gay as Somerset Maugham!"
        "What about summer, dear?"
        "Oh...never mind."