the first fiction of a series by Tully Thibeau

This was the new century, just getting started. Young, like the woman. The man was not; he was more like the century that preceded the one that had at long last come to its close. At least, that’s where his values seemed to be located, but appearances were, essentially, deceiving. The principal strategy of the art of war. And the art of love. Ageless. No matter.

It couldn’t have been much past midmorning by the time they finally got started driving the highway out of the valley to go on an “adventure,” their first, it would turn out.

::

Less than an hour earlier, she was admiring the way he packed for it and said so out loud.

“You pack for shit, dontcha?” she drawled in her Midwestern northern cities’ voice, vowels open and elongated, and, while the cadence may have sounded not faintly indistinct, to him the final vowel was as unmistakable as they two, she being open, he being elongated.

As usual, he said nothing to her and smiled, fully consumed by absolutely nothing.

He liked she was a chance-taker, taking this trip, for one. Taking him on for another. And for admitting, upon having just praised his bundling, that at the unqualified very first she felt drawn to him somehow. And then for gradually letting herself be drawn. In closer. On mornings after she’d sleep over, she wrote him notes on opened envelopes that he kept stacked on a desk. He’d return home later in the morning to find her gone yet expressing herself with what he took to be a rectitude, and her words made him wonder if she selected them to get an honest response from him because such were the experiences she appeared to love most unconditionally, if by chance there were a gradient. He’d scribble something posing as poetry in response, and always on the same envelope that she had scrawled on, the kind of poetry intended to be about as gut-honest as could be amid sunrise and lecture, is how he understood it to mean, poetry being of the previous century. He understood, too, that, while she had her way of carrying out on a reckless spree which made it seem equally a duty and jubilation, setting out on the task now at hand with such carefree spirits would also be risky, for they were choosing to relate at a root level, character, the stuff of what they were made, by which they lived. A strange place to travel, he thought zipping his pack, mostly in the sense of where dwell total strangers, nobody he’d ever get a chance to know. But on first meeting her, though, he discovered her to be astonishingly familiar, much more of an actress performing a role in a scene they’d repeatedly rehearsed and playing her part as if she had truly just met him for the very first time, all the same.

The night before, they had confessed to one another that neither one of them wanted to admit what they thought might be going on between them right now, agreeing, “we better not give whatever this is a name.” No word felt natural enough, so instead they made out in several different rooms of his apartment before settling down in a bedroom, then petted heavily, caringly stroking each others’ bodies concealed within their clothing before entwining each other for taking a longish nap in those very same clothes. On waking she stripped to her underwear in order to complete a handful of sun salutations; he studied her ribcage and how the muscles rippling across her back were attached to it as he lolled momentously, witnessing what dreams reveal. His vision receded, so he took on a function of a guide, swapping them back and forth among drinking coffee, getting outfitted, and eating of the fruits she had picked from some neighborhood trees a couple of days back.

Soon enough, it must have been time to depart: His car was packed with their gear, yet neither one could particularly recall actually doing that; all they could grasp effectively was what was happening before their eyes at that very moment.

(a road sign reads)
LEAVING MISSOULA COUNTY

photo by Josh Funke