4/18/13

Triadic Tales - The Hand - Short Story (Part Three)


Triadic Tales - The Hand - Short Story (Part Three)

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I am in a crouch at a black jack table at Binions in downtown Las Vegas. It is two used Mercedes since that fateful drive over the hill. These cars last me three years or so.  Their price goes down as Mercedes accedes to the declining tastes of the market, rendering them antiques of a sort, discovered only by folk with whom I share a generally silent sympathy.

Bill and I are finally a couple. I guess that's what you call it. We've been that only a few months. 

As I play this low-stakes shoe, I'm still thinking what to say to my children and my ex. She'll spread the word to the whole world. I wonder if that will lead anyone to the little apartment where Bill and I live.

When we met by chance, or was it chance, back then, I came to find in Bill someone so unlike me that when the similarities that run like mine shafts deep inside us began to resonate, I would spend months remembering one revelation after another. 

Bill and I are deep down two of a kind. Nomads of the universe. Free and bound but spirits nonetheless.

When Bill's matter-of-fact hand creates in me a more complete release than any I have ever felt, I think how right it was to finally go with my own growing intimations. 

Bill has an openness that takes me or leaves me depending and that therefore allows me to rest free in his embrace.

I do not hesitate to say, now that I have gotten it out, that I knew of my attraction to my own sex well before I began my wandering ways. I knew that the way Bill and I love with our bodies is a free choice. And that loving children remains massively more on the scale of reality than our little choices about how to relate to each other.

We have no children now, of course. I doubt we will. We are too hand to mouth. But a child leads us all. And the brokenness of our world begins with the way we treat the child.

Bill will come by later. We will probably play a few hands and maybe walk out on Fremont Street before going back to Boulder City.  

We did not get together the first time we really talked. That was in the Kingman dawn almost ten years ago. We became friends slowly. A cumulative progression, with bumps along the way.

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I get up from the table and move to the coffee shop in back. Maybe Benny Binion, the Horse Shoe owner, will show up. He usually does. But now his corner booth is unoccupied. 

I read. My notebook is open. 

"The hand we're dealt does not rest on character or even proclivity."  So writes Dr. Addison of Austin Riggs. His book is sensible.  "It is a hand of our own making, ever changing, delimited by values we live by."

I look down at my hands. To me, they're nondescript. But Bill says they are beautiful. 

Life is beautiful. 

Ah. 

Here comes Bill.

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