To the End of Things

We met on a Sunday for sundaes, and right out she said that she belonged to a group. I think she wanted to jar me. The group, she said, believed the world was flat. It could be worse; signals from space she received on her radio, or maybe through her spine into her skull. That’s usually a deal-breaker, she said. I winked, not sure what a wink would mean. She seemed to like it. We walked down Armitage, and I wondered if this was what it meant to be un-lonely. I don’t know, she answered, and I hadn’t known I’d said it aloud. She bumped against me a lot. Helicopter leaves whirled around us and I thought of gravity, how feathers and rocks were to fall at the same rate but only in vacuums, in worlds unlike our own. We looked in windows and a painting of a grotesque woman gnarled like tree knots spooked me and sent me running down an alley. I thought I’d again once again ruined something, but she’d run, too. Now, we have something we can laugh about, she said. I asked her where we were going, walking like this, and she took hold of me and pulled me along.