Today we save time, and today she has a new fellow. We like this one, who tosses tennis balls against his apartment wall, jokes how the neighbors cannot stand his childlike exuberance. These aren't his words, but my own, applied 25 years later, realizing he's younger than I in this memory.
Today we save time, but he can't watch us the entire way. He drops us off at the hospital and pushes an elevator button but remains in the lobby. We wave and recognize the next floor by the assortment of jars behind the window. Each contains a parasite, preserved.
Some are too small to be seen, the names of these worms taped to the side in red label maker. But the tapeworms are too big to believe. It's all so much a museum of horrors, this place where she works.
Today we sleep sinless in the hospital chapel room and stay out of troubled waters. We won't be returning to the new fellow's place, but it's just as well. They always turn into disciplinarians once the glow wears off, around midnight, the two of us eating away at the apartment wall, until we have taken its place entirely, functional parasites.
We are meeting a new fellow soon, she says, a friend of a friend, and a God-fearing man. We think of the God-fearing men we know, relatives who discipline our cousins in the bathroom, quietly. They emerge, both man and child teary-eyed and kneel. They are made by these men to pray together, asking for whatever forgiveness remains uncovered by the policy of lash and leather.
Today we save time because we don't have to dwell on the memories absent from our own lives, the humiliation of having had God rubbed into our open wounds whenever we transgressed. We use this extra hour of the day to rejoice in a bit of remembrance, that the two of us, bookworms, were a heavy burden upon our hosts, long since enfeebled by our years of depletion and silence.