Today's writing

She presses her heels into the thick carpet and spins. I think she means to face me, but her balance is off and she’s looking at the bland hotel art instead. Her face crumples and opens. It’s like watching a discarded newspaper suffer a nervous breakdown.

Then she laughs. She comes out with a huge, deep belly laugh that’s so endearing it takes me with it. I laugh too. We laugh together. It feels good.

“You were right,” she says, her glee slowing to a series of hiccups. “That loser can’t find his asshole in a rainstorm.”

You know what a dog looks like when it really pays attention? When the ears go precise and cockeyed, still as stone? When the eyes focus and fix, and there's just one single thing in the world?

Call me Rover. “Yeah?” I say. It’s all I can say. I want her to cut the bullshit, get to it. I want her to tell me that she’s kicked him out. That our home, however changed, however damaged, is once again ours.

She says: “So I took him to Harry Olander to get business advice, and …”

The rest of her words go missing. They fall into a sharp, harmful haze: a tule fog. A thick air mass that forms on clear nights. The kind that comes after the season’s first rainfall. You can’t see in tule fog. You can’t predict its arrival. You can only react, blind, hoping for the best.