There Is Love
Afternoon sun, and suddenly the returning prisoner scratching at the old lover’s door, the one he left behind in the half-shadow, half-light, dragging his years of sin and memory up the veranda steps like a sack of bricks, asking in a low voice—are the children sleeping, or still marching into the schoolyard dream? The air thick with gossip already, the servants leaning in from the kitchen, the neighbors crouched at their windows, the film-people with their cameras and hungry tongues— scandal always splattered across page one, charity and blood hidden in the classifieds, as though the truth itself were embarrassed to breathe. This is the time for stories, not the tidy ones, but the clumsy, the overheated, the interrupted, the kind that break open when someone whispers come closer and the characters refuse to speak unless you touch their skin. What is love in middle age but money, property, children’s faces flickering between appointments, health insurance files stacked like ...