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Paul Hina | February 21, 2010
My newest book, Inexplicably, Love: Three Stories of Love in Real Time, is now available to buy on the Amazon Kindle or Kindle-compatible devices. This book includes my fourth novel, The Torch Bearers, and two novellas, Clair de Lune and Inexplicably, Love. There isn’t a dead tree version of this book, and for this reason [...]
Paul Hina | February 21, 2010
The Torch Bearers
“When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.”
—from the Stars song “Your Ex-Lover is Dead”
Friday Evening
The dread of attending a dinner party is usually enough to feed his nausea, but the perfume wafting from the bathroom certainly doesn’t help. He has never particularly liked her choice of perfume, but the sensitivity of the subject has only grown over time. If he had said something soon after they first met then he might have been able to get away with it—if it had been done tactfully—but there is no tact left. If he were to say something now, it would seem needlessly hurtful. She would know that he has always disliked her perfume, and would obviously wonder why he has spent all these years not saying anything about it. And, as always, she would blow it way out of proportion, accusing him of being disgusted by her perfume, even if he never said any such thing, though sometimes the proportion of perfume to any other smell in her immediate orbit does tend to disgust him. That’s not so much the perfume’s fault as much as the fault of the user’s gracelessness, which she has in droves.
No, that’s not fair.
Paul Hina | February 21, 2010
Clair de Lune
The rain has stopped, and its dreary rhythm, that comfortable chaos of white noise, eases away and leaves Frankie quietly alone in her apartment.
She is staring at the call box, waiting for that beautifully awful buzz that announces an arrival. It has been weeks since she has heard that sound and expected a visitor other then someone dropping off take-out. She has been waiting on that buzz for the better part of ten minutes, sitting on the arm of the couch, staring at the box, trying to place her attention on something other than her crying, but she just can’t stop.
Stop thinking about it. Refocus.
It is a clean box, not really a box at all, but a rounded white rectangular object that rests on the wall by her door. The box represents a level of sterility that you might expect to see in a hospital or a government building, and there is no question that it does not fit the décor of the rest of Frankie’s apartment. Her apartment suggests a more colorful person, though Frankie feels as though it expresses a level of color that she does not match, or doesn’t allow herself to match.
She breaks down again, and she turns away from the box as if it were watching her and she didn’t want it to see her crying. Then she turns back to it, slowly, almost as if she were waiting for it to comfort her somehow.
Come on. Come on.
She stands up to go to the bathroom, to check her eyes, her make-up.
Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!
She stops in her tracks, turns, and immediately pushes herself toward the box, making obvious attempts to straighten her voice out. She practices, “Yes?” Again. “Yes?” Does she sound like she has been crying?
Buzz!
“Yes?”
“It’s Johnny,” a voice says, stained with crackling static.
“Come on up,” she says with a forced air of normalcy, although she thought she could hear that nasally weeping sound coming from her throat. She hits the button on the box to buzz him in. She cracks the door open and runs to the bathroom. Her eyes are red, and clearly show that she has been crying. She is too old to hide the emotional signs of crying that she could more easily hide in her twenties. She runs some water into the cups of her hands and rushes it over her face and eyes.
Paul Hina | February 21, 2010
Inexplicably, Love
M… swirls the bourbon around his glass just to hear the ice sing. The bartender reacts to the song the way a bartender should, moving toward the empty glass with a half-cocked bottle in his hand.
M… nods as the bartender tilts to a pour.
“More ice?”
“Please,” M… says.
The bar has been mostly vacant since M… arrived hours earlier. These hotel restaurants are often empty at this time of day. He looks up at the clock, stares at it for a second. He feels as though he has been drinking for hours and yet the clock mocks him with slowness. A series of stuttering seconds barely pass. Time slows. His drinking has not.
This is a fairly upscale restaurant for a hotel, and the restaurant portion is sporadically decorated with people. M… turns toward the chatter, opens his ears to the voice of the din. He hears a plate drop in the kitchen, turns quickly toward the noise, and the subtle whiplash of the turn reminds him of how heavy bourbon makes his head.
His phone, placed ceremoniously on the bar, vibrates and ignites with light. M… lets it go a little longer than he should. He briefly considers not taking the call at all, but the problem with cell phones is that they leave few excuses. No more, ‘I was out of the room for a second,’ or, ‘I was at the conference.’ Cell phones tether you to their violation, leave privacy somewhere in the distant past.
M… picks up the phone. It is her.
