Estates Large and Small by Ray Robertson

Author:Ray Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2022-07-25T19:19:45+00:00

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First, fucking; then, philosophy: as long as I get everything I want, I don’t need much. I slide out of Caroline’s bed and rest my bare feet on the small throw rug covering the hardwood floor. If Caroline was a prescription drug she’d carry a warning about not operating heavy machinery or driving a motor vehicle immediately after having sex with her. Blood flowing upward again, back to my brain, I stand up and stretch and go to the bathroom and shut the door. We just did all manner of this and that, but we’re not yet at the peeing-with-the-door-open stage of our relationship. The oversized clear plastic medication organizer on the sink counter containing every day’s unsettlingly large allotment of pills is a reminder that there’s no guarantee we’re going to get there, either. I urinate and splash some water on my face and use the towel hanging on the back of the door to dry off. It smells like Caroline. Now I do too.

Caroline has woken up and lit up and is sitting up in bed, but with a joint, not her usual post-coitus cigarette. She doesn’t offer any details (and I don’t press her for any), but she says she’s not feeling great. She closes her eyes and inhales. I lie down beside her, but stay on top of the blankets, use one of the pillows to cover my naked crotch. The air-conditioning means it’s cool enough for me to get back underneath the sheets, but it’s not even dark outside yet, it feels wrong, just like getting high right now would be wrong, like guzzling whisky at a baseball game on a summer afternoon. To every drug there is a season. Besides, after what we’ve been up-and-down, in-and-out up to, I feel pretty high already. I link my hands behind my head and let go a long exhale.

“Are you sure you don’t want some of this?” she says, holding out the joint.

“No, but you go ahead.”

“Oh, I plan to,” she says.

Caroline’s pot is so potent, I’m second-hand high in what seems like seconds. I’m not blaming her — the weed is prescribed medication after all, it has its therapeutic purpose — but now I feel sleepy and sluggish at 6:41 p.m. on a beautiful August evening, and even though there was nothing in particular I planned on doing tonight I resent the fact that it’s going to be difficult to do it. Caroline appears content to toke and stare out the window at the big maple tree in her backyard doing a slow belly dance in the warm, early-evening breeze, but unfortunately I’m stoned-stuck with myself and can’t help but fixate upon the acrid stink that is an old man’s daily decaying body wafting up from underneath the pillow covering my genitals. Pity every middle-aged person’s helpless attraction to the smooth-skinned and the sweet-smelling, the bright-eyed and the bushy-tailed. Lechery is just nature’s way of saying wouldn’t it be nice to be young again.

“Could you please not do that?” Caroline says.

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