It was a walk the length of their lifetime, and still they weren’t able to get comfortable. The moon was daringly high, calculating their speed, and it noticed how the man didn’t have the limp-like saunter the woman had. She was holding back just a fraction, observing the weightless shoulders of her companion which led down to his spine. She raised her hand, then her finger, and drew a capital T from his left shoulder to the other and right down to his tailbone. Taylor! Did you know that, Taylor? Did you know your bones spell you out? She watched his bones through the back of his white shirt, which had an upside-down heart sewn into it with red fishing wire.

Silently pulling at his chin, he focused on the boat in the distance across the sea. Tiny, old thing. He put his hand to his outside pants pocket, wondering how much it could sell for. He wondered if he could manage a creaky cot on the inside. Nothing too grand would do. Maybe he could get a fishing rod and teach himself to catch something. He began to wonder if he could really do that. Catch something, cut it up, and eat it. He doubted himself. He knew that he was the kind of person who would catch and then let go. The slicing part was the most gruesome, he imagined.

It looks so beautiful on the outside, the fish. Sequin-colored, rubbery flesh. Then, rather than savor, we eat it. Grasping the tail, we take up our saws and slice our ways from the belly to the gills, remove the entrails, those nasty guts. The blood, the brain, the personality – everything that makes it what you loved. Then wash up. And depending on how well you opened them up, there are bound to be some bones left remaining to choke on. Then, the filets – the actual edible pieces – were so little compared to his hunger. He disliked the idea. He wondered who would really be interested in such an endeavor. Who wants to ruin such beautiful things? What a waste of time.

The woman behind him shaped him with circles. She drew one around his head, then hers. She made eights with her eyes and hoped they would connect equally instead of having one larger circle and then one smaller, even though the smaller one was actually fuller.  The night was becoming day, for their lifetime was beginning to come to an end. The moon was slowly settling towards the other side of the earth as the sun was beginning to greet them. She drew a circle around the moon, around the sun, around his head, and around hers. Then she sighed deeply and remembered when they were here before.

She pokes the back of his white shirt and asked, “Why is the heart upside down?” He shrugged and nodded, only in agreement. She accepted his silence because her palms could only face upwards towards him. Her aged hands had dried and wrinkled through the night. She was feeling the sleep and imagined lying in her bed, warm and damp from the humidity. She wrapped the blanket at her hips and looked down at herself from the ceiling. Her torso was bare with her breasts exposed. She placed her hand over her stomach and her other on the blankness to the right of her. These big beds, she thought, these big beds lie. I’m hardly comfortable, a queenless king, stuck in the gravity of a mattress.

She welcomed a pressured pillow over her head. She did not classify such a greeting in the necessity cabinet. The boy, she knew, was not able to be in that blank space next to her. He would always be in front of infinity. She sighed the depth of a cloud and breathed out a mist at him. He lifted his hands and waved her away. So, she took in a deep breath, the weight of the ocean and spewed the cold seasons into him, which he guided back to her heart. She broke herself in half, a piñata of sweets and he dug a shallow, unmarked grave for them. She turned her head, spun it upside down and tried to imagine how the heart really was.

It was your eyes that received the image and the brain that adjusted it 180 degrees so that we saw what we saw that we felt. And she was the type of girl who took solace in the rotation that the sun and the moon had agreed upon. And she did not find it even remotely sad, as he did, that the moon and the sun only briefly saw each other in their circular romance.