Corner Apartment Man held out his hand, and Sam instinctually handed him the soup. He in turn handed her a glass of water, and she was none to proud to chug it halfway down before he could stop her.
“Sip it. Let it settle. You look dehydrated. If you drink too fast….well, don’t drink too fast. Got it?”
Sam nodded, the glass still at her lips, and forced herself to take small, ladylike sips. The water tasted amazing, that was the only way to describe it, (her wise mind chastened her and demanded synonyms), it tasted lush and rich and pure and succulent. The water from her airbed tasted like a new water bottle one has forgotten to preemptively clean out…not exactly metallic, but industrial, stagnant.
Corner Apartment Man inspected the can of soup, turning it over and over in his hands as if her had never seen such a contraption before.
“It’s minestrone. And I’m Sam.” She had been feeling progressively paranoid and now the thought permeated her mind that this was all part of a ruse, some way to soften her up and get her relaxed enough to kill her. Had her brain been speaking to her, it might have egged her on, but she had a full dose waiting at home and her brain knew she wasn’t afraid to use it.
“Sam. Short for Samantha.” Corner Apartment Man mused, his eyes darting from the girl in his armchair to the gift she had cunningly brought.
“Short for Samwise. My mom’s a literature professor…and a shameless nerd.”
Something that might have, at any other time, be called a smile passed across Corner Apartment Man’s face. Sam smiled back, cautiously, no teeth involved. But as soon as the smile had come, it was gone, and he continued to mull over the can of soup, shaking it and holding it to his ear, checking the label for tears and imperfections, and running his fingers along the smoothed metal edges of the cylinder.
Sam cleared her throat. “um…maybe you could tell me YOU name, too? “
He stopped his almost lovingly obsessive inspection of the can and looked her over, as if she, a stranger and a strange one at that, had just asked him for the very moon and stars.
“Tom.”
“As in….Thomas?”
“as you will.”
“c’mon, I told you mine.”
“Tom as in Thomas Stearns Eliot, satisfied?”
Sam straightened her back, folded her hands once again in her lap (they had crept back to the arms of the chair), and in a voice she had not heard from herself in over a month, said:
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go through certain half-deserted streets
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask “what is it?”
Let us go and make our visit. “
Tom lowered the hand that held the soup. He sat, finally, on the chaise facing the windows at a 45-degree angle to Sam’s own chair, and for the first time Sam did not feel as if she was regarded as a threat.
“We can eat this dubious soup later. Go on.”
After reciting, with very few mistakes, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, Sam paused. Tom was sitting with the stillness reserved for great pleasure or utter despair. She figured he was the sort of man who would stop her if he wanted to, so she carried on, giving a (not wholly inappropriately) nervous rendition of Caliban’s first speech, then, since she was on a roll and Shakespeare was easy to remember, some of the Dark Lady sonnets. After a time, Tom rose from his chair (motioning almost unperceivably for her to continue), and reached up on the tallest shelf of the nearest bookshelf.
For what seemed an eternity, but was in fact only a foot or two of poetry, Sam was certain her was reaching for a weapon; he was going to kill her now, Shakespeare had failed her as surely as he had failed her in the job market, and her brain seemed to lean forward, anticipating guts and gore with ever fiber of it’s terrible being. What would it be? A rusted invaluable blade? A sawn-off shotgun? A sharpened paperclip?
It turned out to be, instead, a bottle of whisky, the good stuff, and while Sam rambled on, Tom left the room briefly, returning with two glasses. He set the on the totteringly thin-legged table between them, and poured two stiff drinks.
“…Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.”
Sam paused again, and sat back, waiting for an invitation. Her water was long since gone, and her mouth was dry from anxiety and plain old dehydration. She glanced out the window. The ash from the fires downtown had turned the sky murky and bullioned with soot, flakes of it drifted down over the window and across the skyline. If it had been any other time, they might have, to an outsider, looked like friends, sharing a drink and watching the snowfall (eerie though it was).
“drink.” Tom muttered, as calm as she had seen him.
Sam exchanged her water glass for the tumbler of whisky, pulling her eyes away from the skyline with considerable effort. “….shouldn’t we toast to something? I…”
“to absent friends.” Tom leaned forward, ignoring the resulting flinch, and clinked his glass against hers.
Sam couldn’t help but think, not of her family, not of her few and varied friend, not even of the Green-Eyed Girl, but of Xibal. He would know what to do next, he would touch his horn to her glass of whisky to be certain it wasn’t poison, (a unicorn’s horn could determine such things, he had told her once), he would know right away if this Tom character was a good man, or simply buttering her up.
Still, she hadn’t had a proper drink for over a month, and she figured poison would just as surely kill Tom, too. But what if that’s what he wanted? Some company, an impromptu poetry reading, and a clean death to top it off. What if this was his ultimate Plan, to go out with a little culture and good booze? Paranoia reared it’s ugly unfeathered head, and proceeded to nibble wet red bits of out her otherwise trusting heart.
“you’re not drinking.” Tom said, eyes on the falling ash.
“I…”
“if you think I want to kill you or fuck you, nothing could be farther from my mind.”
“oh.”
Sam considered herself plenty fuckable, but she got his meaning.
“drink your drink.”
“Fine….” She took a sip. “Jesus Christ, it tastes like dead people!”
“that’s Laphroaig for you. You’ll get used to it. The taste you’re describing is peat.”
Sam took another cautious drink, while Tom told her to let if roll over and around her tongue, and found herself enjoying the fire that followed each swallow. She was a drinker of beer and mixed drinks, mostly, and never ordered whisky neat unless she was doing shots; she preferred vodka or rum for that sort of drinking. However, she reminded herself, any port in a storm.
They sat together in silence, watching the city each loved in their own demented way drift across the horizon. It was nearly sunset when Tom spoke up again, after each glass had been refilled several times over, and Sam was considering an exit strategy for getting home before full dark.
“where did you get the soup?”
“….My pantry?”
“yes.” He shot her a withering, very Xibilian glance, “where before that?”
She told him how she had traded the last of her cash at the corner store for a meager supply of food, and had to stop herself before adding the part about the homeless lady and her daughter, the Green-Eyed Girl. He didn’t need to know her dreaming terrors, how she spent every night wishing she had saved the poor thing, how Green-Eyed Girl was lost and lonely and in imminent danger. For one thing, her dreams didn’t MEAN anything, she was far from a prophetess, and he didn’t need to know just how crazy she was going to even consider the possibility.
“I know those guys.” Said Tom, referring to the owners of the corner store, “they’re pretty decent. We can eat the soup….I suppose you want it heated up.”
Sam eyes alighted like a child at Christmas.
“yeah, I figured. Stay here, I’ll be back.”
Tom stood, can of soup in hand, and checked his pistol and knife holsters with practiced care, crossed over to the door and checked the deadbolt and chain-lock, then ducked into a side room that Sam could only assume was the kitchen.
Sam sat back and observed the skyline. From Tom’s window she could see the east-west street leading to the shoreline. She wondered, suddenly, if the lake water was any good after it was boiled and strained and, what did she know, iodized or something?
She wondered too, how Tom had such expertise with survival….here he was, drinking good whisky while the world burned down around him. It was hard to be anything but jealous. She would trade her right arm for a feeling of security, the security he seemed to have. She though for a minute about grabbing the keys to her place while she had a chance….but realized how stupid that would be. If anyone were going to steal them, Tom would hear them first, wouldn’t he? He’d heard her. If anyone were out there, he would know, right?
You’re in over your head, her brain whispered, then scurried away.
I hate it when you’re right, Sam sighed, and sipped her whisky.
Kindling: Xibal, Sam and Tom 