Concerning the Spared Rod

  When he was younger Kevin once made a mistake and thoughtlessly swore. He couldn’t remember if it were an accident or just something he’d picked up on the street, repeated in a child’s mindless parroting. It didn’t really matter: his father’s retribution was swift. Blasphemy of the Spirit will not be forgiven.
  And Kevin was stretched, shirtless, between the doorposts, and his father read from Isaiah in the Bible over the tumult of Kevin’s tears and wails for forgiveness, for mercy.
  “By His stripes are we healed.”
  By Kevin’s stripes the child is redeemed before his God, and by a brown leather belt are those stripes carved like a painter flinging his brush at the canvas. Above his head, a crucifix looking on with sorrow. Below, welts blossoming on the canvas like red roses, or the thin trickle of blood licking the needle in the crook of the elbow, and the brief grimace of morphine and vein in coitus. Spare the rod, condemn the child.

Concerning Fire, People and Beignets

  Kevin traded her a clove cigarette when she returned with a plate of pastries and coffee refill, and they sat a few moments sharing the serene silence of warm company. “You don’t look so well,” Ivy finally observed, tapping ash and pushing her glasses back up her nose.
  “Bad dream,” Kevin said, biting into a beignet gingerly. “Didn’t sleep well last night.”
  Ivy was aware of his attempts at coping, but while he never felt judged or condemned by her he was reluctant to allude to it. “Addiction” was another word they didn’t mention much. He wondered sometimes, feeling blasphemous just doing so, if maybe she just didn’t know what to say.
  “Like that’s new,” Ivy responded. Then she added, “Not that I’ve stones to throw. I spent all night dreaming I was reading a magazine. How stupid is that?”
  Kevin smiled. She could always make him smile effortlessly. “I just need to get out of here,” he brooded.
  “So I’ve heard.”
  “I mean it.”
  “You know I would do anything to help you.”
  “You can’t,” he answered, not unkindly. “I wish I had those kinds of problems.”
  “No one can do it on their own, Kevin. Even healthy people, and you know what I mean by that. It’s a structure built into our psychology.” She took a draught of coffee as though it were her wellspring of inspiration. “Look, perhaps you should view it as fire. For all its destructive genius it can be friendly, and that friendliness we depend on. Whether by carbon or electric, we need it to see, to be warm. Maybe we just stress over the definition too much. But that’s why we have people.”
  Kevin stubbed out his cigarette. “Tell that to God.”

Concerning du Monde

   The mid-morning crowd was sparse, a handful of suits sipping espresso absently over newspapers and the occasional college kid with a wan hangover smile. Ivy must have seen him out there in a sea of blank white tables. It wasn’t long before she appeared with a cup of coffee on a tray, sloshed brown stains crawling down the side of the ceramic. She was accompanied by a gangling guy in a green smock.
  “Thank you, how did you know?” Kevin said.
  “You develop a nose for these things,” Ivy replied with a smile that would make angels renounce their vow. “This is Andrew. He’s from Dublin.”
  “Ireland?”
  “Ohio. Like Wendy’s,” Andrew said.
  Ivy explained, “I’m training him.”
  She was thin, petite, face blessed with a cowl of dark hair and green cat eyes. Kevin was in love with her in ways that only the wholly lonely can know, “the deep, unutterable woe which none save exiles feel,” as Aytoun put it. Something he was also unable to express; it wasn’t a language he felt comfortable with, and he was never able to dispel the feeling of undeserving to be around her. Somewhere, he knew that she loved him too. He wasn’t brave enough to probe the how.
  “I’ve a break in about fifteen,” Ivy said. “Have you had breakfast?”
  Kevin gave a look that indicated he wasn’t familiar with the word.
  “That’s what I thought. You look like you could use a beignet.”

Concerning the Cafe

   Café du Monde, but not THAT Café du Monde. The place tried to style itself after the best parts of New Orleans gothic nostalgia, but the point where they truly succeeded was in the vitriolic coffee and immortal atmosphere.
  Kevin went here as frequently as he was able, partly for the coffee, beignet and ambience, but mostly because he knew a waitress. He would never frame it to her in these words, but Ivy remained his haven, lighthouse, the thread that kept him from plummeting absolutely. He was afraid that even this hold was too tenuous, despite her consistent attempts at reassurance. He had few other friends. Mostly his father disapproved of everyone.
  Poorly clad against the wet spring chill this morning, a black pea-coat he’d grabbed on his way from the house over a t-shirt, he stepped over the iron rail and helped himself to an empty table. It was beyond his routine, it had become a sort of intimacy, birthed ideally amid the nostalgia the café attempted to appropriate. They had first met as he had seated himself in her section.
  Mirrored pools of rainwater lingered in low spots in the concrete, floating leaves blown in over the wall before dawn. Kevin emptied a puddle from the peeling metal chair beneath a green awning, clearing as much of the water as he could before he sat.