Another Zine Preview.

The first thing that came to mind when we found the body was a terrible joke. It wasn't just that it was in bad taste considering the circumstances, although that attributed to it, the joke itself was inherently bad. The kind of joke that deadened rooms, and I knew it. It almost slipped out while my girlfriend, Mary, was still gaping in horror at the amount of blood. An older woman had jumped from her apartment balcony. We saw the body, limp and broken, before we heard the cries that it had been a suicide. It happened about a block away from Mary's apartment, where we were headed. The woman looked so old lying there on the pavement. About eighty? I looked at Mary, her mouth still gaping like an aquarium fish. What the hell. I decided to let the joke loose. "All she had to do was wait another couple hours and she would have died of natural causes."

"How many grapes can you fit in your mouth?" It was later in the afternoon, and she seemed calmer, almost docile. I plucked a handful of grapes from the bowl that lay at the exact midpoint between the places at which, graphed out by cold tile, we were sitting. It seemed absurd to me, to be sitting on the kitchen floor. But she just needed to sit down right where she was I guessed, so I moved the bowl of grapes from off the counter and sat down too. I hadn't ever seen her sit on the kitchen floor before, It was the first conversation we had there. I let it go because I realized it didn't actually matter where we sat. She didn't answer.

Mary gave me that look she has. One of those forcibly indifferent stares. like she was so above cramming grapes in her mouth. I was trying to get her to forget about the old woman. We didn't know her, and that was probably for the best. I've always been able to cram more grapes in my mouth than anyone I've met. Usually girls think it's funny. I was like a cute, silly chipmunk they'd tell me. But Mary was somone else. One of those "I'm eighteen but i'm soo old types". If I couldn't get her to cram grapes into her mouth maybe she'd at least let me try to toss them in. "Open up." I said. Teeth shining between chipmunk cheeks.