Story Fragment (Comfort Dogs of War)

This doesn't really sing to me, so it's probably never going to be finished. But it's nice to know I'm  b still able to write.

I am healthy in body and mind, and I am filled with love for my wife and children. It is nearly after four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, in May, in Paris. The sky is dove gray and lovely as stone as I carry my plastic shopping bag to the nave. I have a letter, a bottle of good sparkling wine, a corkscrew, and a gun in the bag. 

They do not want me walking down this street, in May, in Paris.  My editor wants me to take a vacation; Roux is constantly forwarding me electronic mail missives of black sand beaches in Tahiti, craggy young mountain ranges in the Americas. Now only 1900 Euros!  they tell me in the bluest possible letters yelping from the screen of my processor. When I read these messages I feel an ache in my liver. All these people moving so fast across the earth and they don’t stop and they don’t pay attention to what matters.

I know what matters. It is a May day, in Paris. I had a good marriage, I did right by gods and France and my wife. I never touched a man with desire. It is a Tuesday and the tour groups are shiny faced and clutching brochures laughing at mother Notre Dame.  When did so many fucking people start coming here? In the years after the war, they didn’t come. When France was rebuilding herself ligament by ligament and the poppies grew in Flanders fields and we could’ve scraped money out of them like roe out of mackerel to rebuild the boulevards, they did not come. Now, here they are. In one hundred colors, a babbling cacophony of tongues and pollution. They tell me that acid rain is wearing down the carved saints of Notre Dame. Secretly, irrationally, I believe that it’s the sour scraping sound of these foreign languages eroding away at Mother Mary.  

I slip in to a back pew and cut the foil on my 1961 Chateau Margaux. Not a great year. Nothing like 1935. I drank a 1935 Chateau Margaux  when I was fifteen that caressed my balls like a lover.  People forget how soon after the war that was