Drops of Jupiter by Train and Ernest Bazanye

The wind is mean. A mean, dark wind spilling and spiraling over wet ground. It falls against my forearms and neck and temples and brow. I snug my collar closer around me and wince to draw my thoughts away from the fresh memory of my last hit and thoughts of next hit. I’m dreaming in spite of myself … I try to draw my thoughts away but they keep slipping back and I keep looking up to the corner for to see if I shall catch the arrival of the shadow in a trenchcoat with the vials of lies hidden in any of a dozen pockets.

It is the sudden sound of rubber on wet concrete that makes me turn away from the cracked yellow of the dim streetlight. Squelch on ancient pave, squelch over crack, silent as it leaps daintily over a puddle and lands with a smaller sound on the other end, squelch and squelch and it finally arrives. That leap was a small effort for a woman who we know knew could fly. I look up to see the return of my cosmic traveler, who merely grins.

And for all the things she has that she could say she chooses just hi.

She hugs her shoulders closer to herself and she shakes the stardust out of her hair and just says hi.

Of all the things I could say I just say four words. “So, how was it?”

She stops against this wild black wind as a painting does and then nudges my shoulder with her hip and I scoot over because she also doesn’t want to go indoors and she sits down next to me and doesn’t answer my question.

It feels like it always has to be next to her on this perch. I ask again. “How was it? Tell me.”

Did the wind sweep you off your feet? Did you sail across the sun? Did you make it to the milky way and find the lights all faded?

She sighs and a small smile seep slow sad stories. The matron with the lazy eye and the starched white uniform, the grass that never grew, the fruit trees that never bloomed, Neptune with his phantom rings, the moons, all eleven of them, of Jupiter, the asteroid that plummeted straight into the belly of Phobos. There was an orderly with the stutter who suffered so badly and the light of Alpha Centauri was so cold.

Again I turn to the streetlight and my skin itches for that nanosecond of pain. It wants to break, it wants to break to yield to a needle, to suck in the pale juice that destroyed us both.

Mountains crumbled over us every night before they came and took her away.

I look to the streetlight for the arrival of the traitor who looked just like saviors do when he rode up in his trenchoat.

She talks about how white the walls were and how everyone spoke in low voices. The flat plastic beds and the neverending asphalt of the Milky Way.

Tell me, I ask, “Did you miss me?”

Remember the mad rushes of our veins collapsing and the sweet folding in of our spirits before they were unfurled and how the next day our tastebuds were burnt and we could not tell that the soy latte we were sipping was the best one ever and how I took bullets for you before you were bundled into the spaceship and shot into another world called away from me.

Orion blazes and Sirius flashes a signal in the wrong language.

I know that when we hugged her and said we wished her the best, I didn’t. I didn’t want to be left alone, not here. I didn’t want her to come back clean because then it wouldn’t be coming back.

There is another sound. The wind brings it to me. Under the streetlight, boots and the faint clatter of glass against glass. The trenchcoat is here. Before I will close my eyes and surrender and get up and walk over to him and hand him a ball of crumpled notes I ask again that she tells me.

“Did you miss me?”

She sighs again.

“I will,” she says.

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