Nike passes on and I drive home immediately to find an empty house with her things still scattered about.  I open the doors wondering if I'll find her body lying there.  I hear the silence as if it were contained.  I had told myself, driving, I wouldn't cry until I got home.  Now, every object of hers and every empty space that was hers pulls tears from me.

Silence meets the sniffles and as I sit at the piano I find her song in G major and A major.  I play to harmonize the silence.  The chords ascending and descending pitched evenly brings more tears to my eyes and I imagine her so steady.  Despite everything, whether in her or in me, she pitched her eyes so steadily.

When my mother came home she was strong.  Slightly jovial, no recent tears, she's been busy running errands for others.  I let go the piano to face her.
"Have you been crying?" she asks.
"Yeah, I broke own a little when I got here."  It's hard for me to speak.  "So umm, so what happened?"
She explained.

Before we left to see her body I sat outside in the brisk January bleak, under sun radiated smog. Silently, I listened to the hum of the highway and the wind passing through the skeletons of trees.  The sun bore down on my low head, my body crisscrossed in the shadow of those bare sticks.  My mind projected her image where the green of grass reflected between her brown iris and every blade of our yard shown in the pupil of her eye. I, with a fear of being friendless, wept.    "I need her, I needed her!"  Then, I wept gratefully. 

The vet brought her body in on a cart covered by a green blanket and pulled it back over her head.  She lay almost alive, fur soft as ever, practically, asleep.  My mother cried and couldn't let the blanket fall back over her.  She just kept scratching her ears and talking about memories as if she could hear.  I lay my hand on her head and said a prayer:

"Oh, Nike, you are part of so many memories.  Travel to wherever you are going. I'll see you there.  Enjoy chasing the birds and the bees and running through the rain without me. I'll find you sitting, golden in the sun.  Look over to where you'd find me, and when you see me sitting there, I will embrace you."

Finals, kids screaming just outside my window and baking sure as hell aint easin' up.  When am I going to sleep?  Eh, I'm doing alright and almost through with finals.  Well, the least i could do is start laundry, cook dinner and study.  I'll just go to bed early, 'though I wont sleep till the kids do. I can just meditate and relax.  Laundry room is full, I'll come back later.  Okay, she's finished lets go, bend and load.  Look at my watch, 5:30 already, huh? Dammit,  won't be finished till 9:00 tonight. 

Baked yams, spinach salad with radishes, almonds, carrots, feta and olives and a piece of fish for dinner.  As I sit in front of my plate I look on with gratuitous wonder.  I exclaim aloud, "Goddamn! A lucky man! So rich . . . damn."  Another glass of wine and dinner leave me feeling fine.  Forty minutes on that girls drier still so I pull my books and start to write.

Well she ought to be done.  I walk out into the dingy hallway, down the stairs, past a few doors and around the corner into the laundry room.  A yellow piece of paper sits on the drier.  A man stands in the corner.  He looks forty and he's thick but well built with prison tatts up his arms.  He wears a plain purple shirt, dark pajama pants and royal blue slippers.  He stands  over six feet despite being hunched over a metal walker.  He told me before it was some mad surgery on his back.  "I'm waiting fo' you," he says.  Cocking his head towards my washer he looks slightly impatient under thick gray eyebrows.  "Thought you'd gotten lost o' somethin'." 

"Girl broke the good dryer didn't she?"  The yellow piece of paper has a note written in poor handwriting: 'Out of order.'  "Guess I'll use the piece of shit dryer."  I notice his wash is still running.  What's he in such a hurry for?

"Now it 'ill take you t'ree hou's," he says with a real heavy drawl and chuckles.  I look at my watch, its 6:30, now I won't be in bed till 10:00.  Well . . . unload, bend and load, quarter slots fill and I press tiredly out into the hall.

He walks with me making small talk.  "I cun fix that drie', jus' a sho't, but da last time I fissed it someone tol' managament and I get in t'uble.  Gotta wait fo' eve'yone da leave da halls." 

"Right on man, I'll see you later tonight."

Sure, I've hardly slept a total of eight hours these past few days but I've got to study anyway.  I sit in my bed with my legs extended.  I have my book, old exams and notebook assembled around me and get to work.  Outside, the kids scream like warriors.

Thinking about that note I begin to wonder . . . that conniving cripple!  He's fuckin' with me.  He put that note there.  He made it up.  He waited for me to come down and move mine over!  I stand, put down another empty glass and re-harness my pants.  

I'm sitting in the back corner on top of the good dryer, the door cracked open, a revengeful disable.  I feel a rush, I'm about to have a confrontation and my body knows.  A little shot of adrenaline peaks and with it my heart races, my muscles warm and a newly heightened awareness comes over me.  Am I angry? No, this is fear looking at me.  I breathe.  He isn't here yet.  Just relax.  You're just going to talk this out and keep cool like honorable men. 

I hear the tap and jingle of his walker as he makes his way down the hall.  He comes through the door with a half-grin plastered to his face.  "So, what's going on, you think you can get away with this?" I start easy toned but to the harsh point.  "I'm not going to stand for it, alright.  I will not put up with more bullshit like this." 

He looks at me with only a little shock.  "What do you mean?"

I move off the drier to stand.  "I mean that note saying the drier was out of order.  You set that up didn't you?  I don't like people fucking with me."

"I ain't fucking with you," now he starts , "I told you that drie' has a sho't.  Ever' time it goes out da 'ussian dick of da maintenance man comes in and fucks a'ound with da back panel.  Dey got dis whole damn place jimmy wigged.  I told you I just ha' ta wait fo' eve'yone ta leave da halls!"  He leaves the walker behind, rigidly walks toward me.  "Are you callin' me a lia'!  I ain't no fuckin' lia'!"  His adrenaline peaks.  His bloodshot eyes are wide and mad, seeming to tremble.  In them I see blood and  visions of my body being thrown against the coarse white wall.  "I just spent fifteen yea's in da joint! Ain't nobody gonna call me no fucking lia'!"

I anticipate anything and try to turn him away from old visions.  "Look man, I'm sorry. I gotta go to work in six hours and the kids are screaming outside my window. I haven't slept in weeks, literally weeks.  I hear you.  I didn't mean to call you a liar but I did and shit man I'm sorry I'm just losin' it tonight."

Not quite free.  "If you wanna roll lets roll, cause you ain't gettin' 'way with callin' me no fuckin' lia'"  He backs out the doorway and into the hall throwing his thick and heavily tattooed arms out.  On one he bears an image of a fanged snake and on the other a bighorn ram.  His jaw contorts in disassociated pain, reflected also in his pupils squeezing.  "So you callin' me some kinda lia'? lets fuckin' go." 

I step into the hall and face him on high alert.  My heart is beating so rapid as to fill four beats to the usual one.   "Look I said I screwed up alright, besides i don't think clashin' my young body against yours is gonna do us any good!  I'll say it again man: it was my bad. I need to sleep. I never fucking sleep.  I'm sorry for calling you a liar, it was just really stupid of me to think of such a thing."  I wait for him to register and reassert my balance.

His eyes let go of whatever it was they held and his whole body calms, his arms return to his side and he lets  his head to one side for a moment. "I ain't no lia'.  Been fifteen yea's for being called a lia' fifteen fuckin' yea's." 

We both return to the laundry room.  "If you wan' you can go 'head and use dis one.  It still ain't even dwy yet."  He looks me in the eye.

"Um, no no its okay, thank you.   I'm almost there here, it'll be about the same.  ... So, how'd you hurt your back anyway?"

"I was on work leave from da prison.  We was workin' on some ranch nea' Monticello.  Well there wazsh this wild stallion, " his eyes light again and his arms lift to describe its incredible size, "we ran into dis one day.  I go' up on it, ya know, and t'ied to break it but it threw me and it broke my spine."