A Kiss Hello

The first time I met her, I kissed her goodbye.

It was a bright golden June. Flags snapped overhead and from behind the entry gate laughter floated out like confetti. Behind us in the queue a pair of girls chattered about nothing.

“You, um, come here for the fair?” I said.

The brunette took in my nondescript brown hair and average jeans, and decided not to respond. But the redhead swiveled my way and said, “No. We heard there was a hanging.”

Her friend gasped. I felt the biggest grin of my life shatter its shell and try wings.

“There was,” I said. “They let me off for good behavior.”

Her eyes widened a fraction. “Do you think that was wise?”

“I promised to behave. I’m very good at promising.”

She nodded solemnly, as a judge pronouncing sentence. “I felt it the moment I saw you. But you don’t intend to keep this promise, do you?”

Wide blue sky above. East wind and the promise of summer. And freckles across her nose. “Not any more, I don’t.”

That day, that perfect, impossible day, I would have gone whistling back to the gallows, for stealing the fire of the gods.

I have never committed a hanging offense in the thirty years since. Until today.

Her message is right there, a baleful eye gleaming dully in the darkness on my end table. My mouth forms the words, repeating them, though I give them no breath.

<I’m free tomorrow at eleven for a couple of hours. I hear there’s a hanging at Zsilinsky Square.>

I reach across the expanse of empty bed and shut the phone off. Out the window, the barest line of dawn has fractured the land from the sky. It was Jennifer’s favorite time of day. Was.

Her photo looks down on me from over the bed. If she could speak I know what she’d say. After twenty-two years together I could say her lines for her when she forgot, and forgot, and forgot. “You have a good thing here, Neal. Don’t mess with it. Good things are fragile.”

Oh, how fragile, at the end.

No one will be in the office today, not on a holiday, but a few stray emails have broken from the herd and need corralling. I rope and brand and tie the gate, but there are too few of them to consume much time. The clock says 6:40. Will she be up? If I text back, will I wake her? I wouldn’t want to wake her.

I stand at the kitchen window and look out over the yard grown stale and the garden unplanted since Jennifer’s hands stopped working the soil. Life has been still for too long. On cue, the weather-cock on the garden shed springs into life, spins, quarters clockwise, and swings back again, steadying. Wind’s in the east.

I reach for my phone.

<This time, no promises.>

On the first ride, we sat together, afraid of the lightning strike of the first touch. On the apple turnover centripetal force tossed her against me, on the ferris wheel another, more powerful force bound our hands, and from then on if I wasn’t touching her I was a windup toy at the end of its spring.

“You like cotton candy?” she said.

“Of course. Sugar. What’s not to like?”

“I’m a carnivore. I didn’t stab my way to the top of the food chain to eat a vegetable.”

“Sugar is a vegetable?” I said, licking sticky pink from my fingers.

She nodded. “It’s a plant.”

I held up the cloud. “Then this is a salad.”

“Mmmmm.” She ran a shell-pink hand over my ribs. “No wonder you’re so healthy.”

She was fourteen. I was fifteen. We had rides home, in opposite directions.

At the last, tingling touch of her fingers I swung her back to me and kissed her with all I had, as they turned out the lights of the fair.

She gave me a phone number.

I lost it.

She will have aged. I have.

My feet tingle after two blocks. The sun beats on my bald head. The square is only a mile and a half from my house, but uphill, it appears. Has it always been?

After the fair, I searched for her. There couldn’t be too many Harsfanyis in a town of fifty thousand, but none of them were her. I called them. Twice.

Then came the Internet. Everyone is on the Internet. Except her.

For twenty-nine years, she was nowhere.

And then…

I’ll step round the corner, and there she will be. I do, but she isn’t. The square teems with tourists, taking pictures of statues.

My chest is tight. My side aches from the walk.

It’s been so long.

I am fifteen again.

Except this fifteen-year-old has had someone to hold and cherish for more than two decades. His arms know what it is to gather in joy. They ache for the loss of it. My tears are dried, withered. I have done with crying. What I need now, like air, like water, is to laugh.

A flash of red hair in a gap in the crowd. She stops, gazes about. If my chest gets any tighter, my ribs will snap. I start forward.

It is no fourteen-year old face under the red curls. The hooded eyes narrow, searching.

My heart will burst. Any moment she will see me. I was nondescript then, but I am descript enough now, and not to my credit. Merciful Heaven, let her see what I was, not what I am.

All at once the eyes widen, the lines smooth, and she is running toward me, her arms wide. She strikes me like a dart and her mouth is on mine and it is not the same kiss, yet it is exactly the same. A lifetime disappears into nothing. I hear calliope pipes, and a barker’s yell. She pulls back an inch.

And the red-haired girl says, “Now, where were we?”