Cold Pizza

The wind whispers ripples on the skin of an otherwise placid body of water; it sows goosebumps on mine and my lover's. My hairs dance in concert, her melanin's shade deepens. The sky bleeds, crimson melts on the treetops and flows into the dam. Monkeys chirp, birds flap their eager wings as they soar towards the wound of the horizon. Twigs snap and plummet into the shallower peripheral parts of the water. Where they collide with the various sized ripples, the offspring of the haphazard and intensifying breeze, and are washed back on land. The canoe rocks with each row, the oars squeal as wood grinds against its kin and kith.

She closes her eyes to let her nostrils take in a good gulp of the pre-evening scents. For the umpteenth. That of fresh water, the grasses and duckweed. In collaboration with the hint of perfume manufactured by a leftover mixture of dung excreted by donkeys and cows when they drink here on occasional afternoons. And whatever else scent the wind selects to accompany from places miles away to the runny nose of my beloved. As if on cue, she pulls the mucus up her nose and spits it out of her mouth. It lands on a flower of frogbit. The bees will enjoy that particular petal's nectar if you ask me. Definition of lust. After her umpteeth-plus-one breath she opens her eyes. They throw darts into my soul.

I blush.

She giggles. "Why are you staring at me like that?"

"Nothing."

I keep rowing. Twenty to thirty more of these and we will be on the shore. Where we will help each other negotiate the slippery bank. Clap hands for ourselves after accomplishing the small feat. Jump over knotted grass, thorny bush and muddy puddle before we throw our tired bodies into the tiny car and drive away. Drive and laugh and listen to our jams until just before the car arrives at the major junction leading from the highway to our small town. There she will disembark and we will go our separate ways like we don't know each other. We have done this enough times to no longer plan for contingencies. What we plan for is the next time we meet, to again indulge our forbidden passions.

"I still look pretty even after the unload?" she says. She pulls her skirt to reveal just a glimpse of her holy grail.

"Your kind of pretty isn't subjective."

"Your brand of flirting pulls me here all the time."

She looks away. She knows what's coming.

"If only we lived together __."

"Trust me, we'd soon get fed up with each other."

"Trust you, huh?"

"I'm the married one here. So, yeah, trust moi."

The trees are more than dancing when we reach the shore. Their silhouette counterparts on the other side wave like electrocuted apparitions. The early-bird stars and a slice of moon are already glistening, tiny beads surrounded by the color of an oozing injury. We plod in the mud and grass until we arrive on dry and bare ground. The tiny vehicle is now in sight. We hold hands as the wind throws at our faces the scent and sting of dust.

"It was amazing," she says.

"Yet I'm the alleged flatterer."

It is a dark green little sedan. Bought a few months ago by Her Highness. As a birthday gift, ostensibly. But her own mouth said the little thing wasn't as thirsty as the rest on show on that specific day; even my meager college stipend would be enough to fuel its little engine. I protested that dark green was far from my favorite color.

"Well, if you still wanna go with me to your stinky little cabin, what we need on a car is camouflage. Orange would stick out of those bushes like a sore thumb. And guess what?"

"You wouldn't come?"

"And neither would you in that case."

Sold.

The car has served its purpose and beyond. On days when I don't want to row, or she doesn't want to wait, or when it rains so much we are sure the makeshift roof of the abandoned cabin will leak, if not cave in altogether, the springs of the little car have prayed for better days when bouncing in potholes is all they have to contend with.

"Shit."

"What?"

She doesn't need to say. She doesn't need to point either. We both stare at the phenomenon that drew the cuss out of her. The little car is still dark green. Its windows are still tinted and intact. It's still in the same position as we left it, under the umbrella of some leaf-generous tree. What it isn't is able to take us anywhere. Not today. Not right now. Its tires are missing, they have been replaced by four boulders which gives the chassis the requisite clearance from the ground.

She hugs her chest. Starts to pant out loud. I instinctively pull the gentleman card from under one of my sleeves. But she shrugs my empathetic advance off. Now she grabs her abdomen.

"This is the definition of screwed," she says.

"We don't know that yet."

I dash towards the car. Everything else is still in place. The keys. My books. My laptop. My goddam iPhone.

She opens a backseat door. Her stilettos are both on their sides, under the seat where she kicked them off her legs in haste. So is her blazer. Her wig. Her glasses. Her bra and panties for a bloody ton of good measure. It doesn't look like a robbery by any reasonable stretch of the imagination. You know its terrible when you wish it was one.

"I'm screwed," she says as she settles heavily on a tiny fraction of the leather that consists of the backseat. My face is buried in my hands. My head as empty as my scrotum was half an hour ago. But whereas the latter was a cause for celebration, the former is the extreme opposite. Particularly when I blurt out, rather absentmindedly: "What do we do now?"

Kill me is what she really wishes she could do. And if she wasn't unsure there might be witnesses lurking in these shadows somewhere, perhaps she might have. Justifiably so for her behind, and I'm saying this as the would-be victim.

"We?" she says. "We?"

"We're in this together, aren't we?"

She struggles to rise up from the confines of the now little liability, hitting her head on the roof of the car and almost toppling over in the subsequent attempt to get over and done with the process of escaping my presence a little quicker. When she eventually succeeds I'm on my feet too, and we are cutting each other's gazes to pieces over the roof of the car. The shadows around us are unifying to become one. The scab of night bandaging the wound in the horizon. The wound in my heart is not quite as lucky. It is alive. It is fresh. It is raw. It causes me to gulp. It causes my eyes to water. Add the sting of the now icy wind and you have tears flowing from my eyes onto my cheeks. They don't abet. They can't. I let them flow.

She looks away. She thinks I'm useless.

We've got each other, I want to say. We can go back to the little cabin if she wants. We left a pizza untouched there. All ten slices of it. Nine and a half to be exact. I chewed half a slice when she went out to pee. It's gonna be cold of cause, blame the wind, but it's still gonna be edible. We can watch Netflix on her phone. Or mine. We can cuddle. We can then plan our next move. Like if she's gonna leave her husband and elope with me. After all, it's surely him who did this. From pushing her away with his nonchalance, to finding out what she's been up to and possibly who she's been up to it with.

She walks a little distance away before she stops. She turns back to face me, her lower lip bitten with such duress I'm sure it will start bleeding soon. She faces her stooge of a lover. Still blank. Still clueless. Still crying.

She makes an advance. So does he. Makes another one. Mine is now emboldened. We meet halfway and hug. We cry. We soft kiss. Then we French kiss. And French kiss some more. When we untangle its because she wants to receive a call from her husband. Or former husband depending on the outcome of the call.

That's cool because I want to make a phone call too. To ask my best friend if he's the one who did this just as we planned, or if its indeed a hand outside our control. Like that of coincidence or her hubby.

Either way, from the way her call is going so far, I think tonight we're eating that cold pizza.