Waking

“I don’t get that show,” Todd lay on his back on my bed, tossing a hacky sack up toward the ceiling, letting it drop in a lazy arc back to his palm. “It never made any sense to me how the hell it’s supposed to be funny.”

We had been talking cartoons for about an hour. The sky was overcast and the afternoon sun had stained the sky a deep, soupy orange fading to purple near the horizon line. The weather said it was supposed to have rained today and I sort of wish it had.

“There’s nothing to get. It’s surrealist humor, it’s not supposed to make sense,” Emma rolled her eyes at him.

She sat in my computer chair, lit cigarette hanging limp from her lower lip like it didn’t want to be there. It wasn’t often that I saw her in any kind of formal clothing so the black dress she wore looked out of place. With her face turned towards the window and her eyes on the sunset it looked like she could have been getting ready for a night out on the town or something. When she turned back, though, I could see the white patch of gauze stuck to her cheek, covering the long, thin, stitched slit, keeping it from getting infected. She had bumped it earlier that day and a dot of red soaked through the middle of the white. It made her terribly beautiful.

“You say that like it’s over my head or something. Every episode I’ve seen is basically fifteen minutes of retarded jokes about moon people smoking grass or a talking meatball going on a diet.”

Todd tossed up the hacky sack again. He lay on top of my comforter, his black shirt and pants blending with the fabric until it was difficult to tell where one began and the other ended. There was a slight glint where the sunlight that managed to peak through the clouds and find its way through the window met the gold of his belt buckle. His usual spot was on the floor; on the bed he looked out of place, almost alien.

“Whatever…” Emma shook her head, ashing the cigarette. She tucked a stray fringe of her straight, caramel hair behind her ear before returning the cigarette to her lip.

“You guys want to go out or something? Like go get something to eat?”

“Not terribly,” my voice was a croak. I had been letting Emma and Todd do most of the speaking over the past few hours.

“No,” Emma stared at the wall.

“Jesus fucking Christ…” Todd said under his breath. “So we’re just going to sit here for the rest of the night in silence? That’s what we’re going to do?”

“Yes.”

There was a finality in Emma’s voice that left no room for retort. Todd sighed again like a petulant child denied his ice cream for the evening. Time seemed relative; it stretched on in an infinite ribbon before us as we sat in my room, surrounded by our own wordlessness, almost suffocated by it, each of us caught in our own personal cocoon of the silence.

“Actually, Katie’s reading her poetry down at the café tonight,” Emma offered, her words seemed violent in the wake of the quiet.

“I guess that’s just another one of those things you have to fucking be there for to really understand, isn’t it Emma?” Todd’s eyes never left the ceiling.

Emma stood and left. I heard a door in the hallway slam. Her eyes seemed damp. I turned and kicked Todd in the shoulder from my position on the floor, but my sock slid across the surface of his shirt and the ball of my foot hit him in the cheek.

“The fuck, dude?” he turned to me. “Not on, man, not fucking on,” he rubbed his cheek.

“Get out of here,” I said as I turned my back to him, “Go take a walk or something.”

He left without a word, but I heard his footsteps moving down the stairs as Emma walked back in. Her eyes were red and puffy and she blew her nose into a tissue as she entered, wadding it up in her fist and pitching it into the wastebasket.

“I hate autumn, it’s murder on my allergies,” she said with a sniff.

“You want an Allegra or something?”

“No, it’s alright. Your room looks bigger.”

“Yeah, I’ve moved some stuff around,” I lied.

“You think it’s going to be alright?” her voice wavered a little with the words.

I thought about lying again, wanted to, but said that I didn't know.

We sat there in the quiet for a long time.