Sum Tactonics (Part 1)

There we were. Sly bodies tangled up like snakes, pale and soft and cold. Without a decent mind we’d be dead in a short night but as it was we held on through the worst of it by piling on blankets and making love so close and so long we shared heat with perfect efficiency. I must have told her ‘I Love you’ a thousand times and I didn’t care to hear it back. This was it. We were lucky to be alive. I was lucky to be in Love.

The following morning everyone looked reptilian. The neighbors passed their child through the freezing air with flickering tongues, scaled skin and yellow eyes. The vehicles cranked with frozen emotionless squeals over dry ice and smoky cold waterways. They made it out, most of them, to the schools and daycares and offices with predictable calm and order; wives and mothers flicking tongues over frozen, dry, clear, precision air on to the scaled skin cheeks of children and reptile husbands and lovers. Very few of them, if any, in sum, were lonely. Some were dead. I had made it one more night and she whom I loved made it one more night and it felt like every night coming would be draught with the same utterly ordinary urgency. I made note of the urgency. My lover did not. So I kept the thought of the urgency to myself and looked for clues to determine if what I had experienced was illusion or delusion or hyperactive psyche. But I kept the looking to myself until enough time and distraction went by that it passed for an ordinary part of my person, just as the cold became, without event, an ordinary reality of our passing. More died, but more always had died, so the urgency, even in death, was familiar and ordinary. As reptiles we didn’t weep for the dead, instead we contracted and slithered and entangled ourselves which helped preserve our time in the cold that crept each day closer to absolute zero. And all of this happened without conversation or acknowledgment or circumstance. It simply was the way we were. It was society. Different than what we had been but altogether civil and polite and living as one unit, better than chaos and abandon and the alternative which we saw played out in fantasy on television screens in heated halls and parlors. Only the heat would preserve us, and food and water, but the heat was the corner stone and the best heat was found between the warm thighs of a lover. Love was action and action belief. I believed and she simply was better than belief. But I believed because it occurred to me to do so and this was better than active disbelief and far better than despair. So I believed and continued to remain in love and love remained with me and she never questioned it and we stayed warm to our daily delight and surprise and I continued to withhold my questions and she continued to be and we made love when I asked her to and when she slithered about me and when there was no reason not to.