Always, Winnie had been told, she gave too much. That there should be something left to be desired. Winnie looked through Dirk’s Facebook, and his new girlfriend had a soft pout, noticeably pink cheeks that made Winnie dream of unsheathing the couple like an old watch reveals a clean tan line. She thought theirs a shifting triptych. Punishment, freedom, ingratitude. 

Winnie stared through the mess around her. Fast food trash on the carpeted car floor and pilfered recyclables to be turned in for easy cash. A heap of bras and panties. Assorted colors which had eyes granted only by the euphemism of love addiction. They had just put up a new fence around the perimeter of the grocery store parking lot. Life in hell was proving unknowable by observation alone. Others’ perceptions hurt Winnie, even if she knew they sprang from her own mind.

Winnie had often thought about how the devout peoples of ancient history believed in the displacement of loss as anger. Fury in their rageful societies as culled as the Ivy League. Fury making a crag so deep that one must leave mental coherence behind as they fall, growing larger — Levitican — while passing through its span. 

Winnie spent the night in her car. It comforted her to think about how running Dirk over with it would mean smothering him with her most insoluble secret. When Winnie was a teenager, she would hump her pillow then lean forward to press her lips to the floor and feel the cool, worn wood with her cheek. She exceeded herself in these moments, almost as if through annunciation.

Winnie’s obsession with sexlessness, cultivated in childhood, had only led her further into sex. Her old coworkers at the Hooters once took turns describing all the girls as different sodas. They had told her she was like Cherry Coke. Winnie believed there was so much sex even in that. The thought of Dirk, which once left Winnie quivering like a yolk, was now a dull, unsavored throb as she swiped through albums of him romping in Paris, Leeds, and the ochre churches of Istanbul on Christmas. Winnie maintained a heartbeat she did not want, an affectiveness of spirit she was unable to draw back inside like a bad smell. Numbness seemed like it would be easier. Numbness seemed like it could dissolve her jagged wings. 

Winnie thought she was always this way with Dirk. Approval seeking, with nothing to show for it but morning blowjobs and vowel soup. Oooooh yes. Ooooh yes you are riiiiight. With her college professors, Winnie always felt she could exude a helplessness and be loved for it. She found that this was not vindicated elsewhere in life. As if everyone around her was denying music, or the glory of food. As if everyone had turned away from God’s divine plan to expose the body. Between her and God, between Dirk and God, Winnie thought she had known something else to exist. 

Winnie wondered if the extinction of romance had been realized within her. Easier to let age and die every fantasy than to follow through or foster any habits from which a world could be dealt upon the crepey blankness. A house, a husband’s suit tie to pull, providence through children. When she watched others through her fogged windshield, Winnie searched them for the promises they had all kept to themselves, and the tacit promises of the generations before them. Those people were solid-seeming, almost agrarian. Winnie sometimes dreamt of a demon child that would pool in her hands like gluey cement, weighing her limbs down while her old professors looked on, covered in gauze and surrounded by a sea of bed posts. 

Winnie loved Dirk because he took her away from her family. He was kind enough to say they came from the same place. He was kind enough to indulge her moody vagaries and not call her Satan. She worried she should have saved all that love she did not understand to be enjoyed at an older age, rather than to feel its transience while she was still young and able-bodied, forced to watch a grayscape descend, her past lives sealed by every new fate she could not muster. What would save her? The guise of a refrain which Winnie could control with touch. The warmth of Dirk’s skin against hers, to be halved then emptied like an animal. Winnie clearly loved Dirk, because she still loved the idea of his forgiveness. Even if it were to only come from him finally getting rid of her altogether. 

Winnie stared at the small breach where the woods met the pavement. There was nobody left at the edge of town. There was no comforting exegesis, and no bestial enemy. Not even Dirk. She had not had the opportunity to cross oceans for anyone. She had not found any joy which would not be stultified a short time later. She feared this was her stake as someone with humble beginnings, that God would never let her forget she was born into a poor family. Was it by her own doing? 

She should have gone to college not for the sake of the message, but for what there was to be learned from structure. The metal implements in Chemistry lab were aspirational. Their grace was in how they each conceded to one purpose alone. 

Winnie went to the Hooters to ask for her job back on an afternoon when the sun seemed stationary, sovereign over all the life and movement below, spared of the cycles of her mind. Her hair was like hay from so many layers of dry shampoo. Maybe, as one woman, she could arbit very little, but a job interview was not dressage. Winnie thought it was more like an abortion. Fast, executive. Detectable by scopes. When she succeeded at convincing the manager to re-hire her, she felt the same panic she always had about getting a job: that it was irreversible. 

On her first shift back, a diner placed his hands around her hips and begged her for a date. He was young. Too young to try and take anything that way. Winnie stumbled backwards and fell as she withdrew from him, her sneakers skidding on the bar floor. 

When she did not notice anyone trying to help her up, Winnie strided defiantly towards the exit, its fingers of milky daylight spreading, rapidly opening the wedge between urgency and lifelong desire. Everyone in the restaurant stared ahead, domed in the diadem of saintly presence. They were merely impressions. Placed, preconfigured. And she was God.