Twit

"Twit's dead," Sue said, whispering into my ear. The guard thought we were exchanging codes, but that wasn't it at all. Poor Sue. She came in with her slight little limp, the way she always enters a room, semi-disheveled but lovely, eyes blue as summer sky sitting low under that sheer halo of downy brown hair. She walked over to me,  first visitor in over a month, the first allowance of human contact in 44 days. I didn't find out I would have a visitor until this morning. Had no way to prepare.

 Sitting in the cell just before, waiting for her, I thought that when I saw her desire would overtake me, that I wouldn't be able to restrain myself. But somehow it wasn't like that at all. I was so tired, and she was so sad.  It was something else all together, just as weighty as desire, just as grappling, but it wasn't me wanting to push my way inside her, it was more about the simple pleasure of being beside her. And what 44 days had done to my capacity to do that simply.

She came in, she held my hands and my stomach sank like an enormous bubble with so much heavy air inside that bubble that it dug down to my feet, pulling all the puppet heartstrings attached to my heart with it. Everything inside me was shifting places, organs fighting to get back into their proper spot so that I could keep on living, breathing, talking to Sue. "Twit's dead," she said. I could tell she had been crying.

She'd had Twit for years, had even hid him once from her ex-husband, for at least eight months before he found out. He was always away anyway. She'd told me she used to fill the bathtub with water and have Twit float, trying to trick Twit into thinking he was on a tiny lake. One day, her husband came home unannounced, one of those time-glitches in travel. He went straight to the bathroom to take a long-awaited piss before even putting down his bag, before even seeing where Sue was -- this was a piss that had been knife-piercing him throughout the long bumpy road his taxi took. And then, just as he was about to release, a sound from behind him: Quack, Quack...Quack. "What the fuck is that?" Sue was still sleeping in the other room. He ran to her, towel in hand, piss still trickling from his penis: "What the fuck is a duck doing in our bathroom, Sue? Get the fuck rid of it!"

"Well, good morning to you too, Asshole." That's what Sue said she said. Because really, it was no use. There was no way around it. Twit and Sue were like two twin cherries, never to be parted.  Twit was a spoil of war, after all, and there's no way Sidewalk Sue was gonna part with her bird.