by Adrian Daniel Schramm | Feb 22, 2018 | Fiction
We’re holding on tight together in the shower, hot taps running down skin and between fingers and toes. We’re falling into fresh sheets on the feather bed, our bodies wrapped tight in blankets, covered in pillows. Touching and laughing about nothing. There’s a small bar at the end of the block – an old and rickety place that smells like cigarettes even though they banned smoking indoors years ago (except in casinos, where rules don’t really apply). It’s hot in this bar, because it’s so small and so full of people. Even (or especially) in winter. People yell for drinks and cheer for their favorite team on the screen overhead. Potato chips hang from the wall behind the bottles: the only thing they have to eat. There’s a dartboard in the back – slightly crooked, like an open mouth with sharp teeth. We throw darts and I let her win. She lets me win. And then we have one more drink while the football game or the baseball game plays overhead, with everyone watching but us. We cheer when they cheer. Everybody stands crowded around the bar holding glasses and magic wands that will make their problems disappear. We carve out a little space of our own to throw darts. We talk about leaving – about long road trips across the country the way used to do – before – when the wide open spaces of the country were still a mystery and the open road could stretch on and on and on until, finally, it stopped at the edge of vast and insurmountable ocean. And everyone knows that...
by Adrian Daniel Schramm | Feb 17, 2018 | Fiction
Gogo stands over the oven. She is sweating – the air is warm and humid, even at night. She is cooking when I come in the door, licking her mother’s red sauce recipe from her fingers. There’s a loaf of bread and garlic next to her with a piece missing. And she says, “Forgive me, but I was so very hungry. You’re late.” “I’m sorry.” “I started eating,” she wipes her hands with a white towel from the rack. “I couldn’t wait.” Only the light over the sink is on, keeping the kitchen in shadows and smells. I take a bowl from the cupboard and she fills it with noodles, tomato, garlic, wine. We sit down at the small wooden table pushed against the wall and eat mostly in silence. We fall asleep on the couch after we’re finished, watching something on TV that we’ve both seen before. The apartment is only one room, so nothing is far away. It was the opposite the last time we had sex. It was the last time we fell asleep together in the bed – slept someplace other than the couch. “You’re early,” she had said, her hair pulled across her forehead, panting, licking her lips, unsatisfied. We watched a movie recently. I don’t remember the title. It was something that Gogo wanted to watch and I fell asleep before it was over. I woke up near the end to a guy with a strong jaw taking the leading lady in his arms and telling her, “You’re silly.” “What?” “To think that the money that you’ll inherit from your mother is what...
