Michael Malone - Weebly

know you are. If you're not with me, I won't be real to
you."
"Are you kidding? Makes no difference, darlin',
where you are, I'll think of you, night and day."
"Oh, Richard, you're crazy." Beanie stood up and
smiled. "Why don't we make paella for lunch? Want
to?"
"Love it," said the laughing poet.
It was not merely that no one Walter Saar had ever
loved had died; no one he had ever known had died.
Those of his family who went before him went before
he was born. The rest clung on. By the chance of
circumstance, death had remained to him a literary
condition. Never before had he experienced the
incomprehensible though uncomplicated fact that
someone with whom you'd been talking one morning
might simply not be there the next, that someone could
be unreachably, irrevocably absent. Dead.
After eluding the Thespian Ladies at the train station
Wednesday night, Saar had hitchhiked all the way home
and fallen diagonally into bed. Awakened by his
familiars, hungover drink and memory, he'd thought with