I meet Wallace downtown to talk about the mistakes that fill my days and within a few minutes the sidewalks are hot to the touch and the sky looks like we’re inside a plum. I don’t know if it’s biblical or nuclear. There’s a simple, glowing chaos and Wallace puts his hand on my shoulder to guide us through the people, into a Mexican grocery where an old woman with wooden teeth is obliviously stacking coins on the lip of the register and watching crowds out her window come together and disperse like old milk. I should have tongue-kissed a foreign girl with skin the color of a vegetable and bought a Dalmatian named after a guitarist and gotten braces and learned Italian and paid my rent on time and divorced my second wife but maybe not my first, and as people start to look for the end, start to scale buildings to either see into the distance or jump to the bottom, Wallace has taken the smallest of bites from his candy apple, opened up the old woman’s hand and placed his change inside it.
Ryan Werner
www.ryanwernerwritesstuff.comDivorcer
Gary Lutz