The last train home; A Flash in Flash Friday

It’s 2013, late in the year, American ground troops are in Iraq, and a man, let’s call him John, kneels on the floor in a roadside motel outside of tupelo. He’s naked, not erotically, a premature mid-age spread flops over his limp penis and the attendant love handles make his ass look flat like an extension of his midline girth. At his right knee is a metronome and at his left knee is a glass flute. He is praying. His prayer has no name, no stated desire and no breath to it. A silent, nameless prayer for abstract good will.

A woman sit’s in the chair, a stiff chair with sparse red upholstery. She is fully clothed, dressed for seduction, low brow, low hanging fruit type of seduction; seduction of the pre-seduced. This is her uniform; polyester, low cut, midriff blouse, a pvc “wet leather” skirt, fishnet stockings and heels that come from a novelty store. She is smoking with controlled and precise boredom, ashing every few moments by lightly spinning the end around the rim of a small glass ashtray with the name of the motel obscured under ash and nicotine stains old and immutable as amber.

The man takes a deep breath and bends to start the metronome exposing the discolored lips of his anus like a GSW to his hog maw silhouette. The metronome clicks out a three four rhythm, mechanical, without emotion; this is both objectively true and occurring to him in the same instance. Any live drummer, even Ringo fucking Starr, can’t help but make a ¾ beat sound jaunty, whimsical, bouncy. He exhales and picks up the flute. He improvises on a theme he remembers from an old collection of French Motets he had been taught to practice with when he was a child. It’s not improvisation for joy or revelation or inspiration; he is a methodical man. He can’t remember the motet well enough to play it straight and he isn’t the sort of man to create from nothing. Like the metronome, he plays precisely and without emotion.

The woman looks at her watch, her cigarette is almost down to the filter.
“Now?” she asks.
The man trips on his breathing pattern and runs out of air before the end of the phrase he is playing.
“Shit, shit, shit” he mutters, carefully sets down the flute and stops the metronome.
The woman lights another cigarette from the last ember of the last cigarette, “Shall we try again.”
He nods looking back her, the folds of fat restrict the degree to which his neck moves, to see her clearly he would have to shuffle his knees. He can’t make eye contact. “Ok, thank you. How was I?”
She blows a thin stream of blue smoke towards his shoulder. “I don’t know, I don’t listen to that sort of thing much.”
“Ok, but did you like it?”
“Um, as far as that kind of stuff goes, you are the best I’ve ever heard.”
A mile away a turkey vulture circles a cow who has fallen to her knees, what she has will infect her sisters and, eventually her humans and even some of the humans who trade with hers. Her eye is pointed toward the constellation of the seven sisters, the reflection clouds as she passes.