A Quarter of a Quartet

I remember Denver.

Then a Grandma picked me up at the bank. Gave me to her grandson who bought a hot-dog with me. Then to the old Arab hot-dog vendor who used me to buy a dried out donut at a Seven-Eleven. And then from the Seven-Eleven I was taken to a bank. And then I was picked up by a Grandpa. Who gave me to his little granddaughter late one Halloween night.

Who lost me fifteen minutes later on a sidewalk in a neighborhood.

I lied face up. Waiting. Waiting. It was cold. The side-walk hard. And time went long. And I don’t know what it is but quarters aren’t too alluring and everyone passed and passed and stuffed their faces with sweets and chocolates and guzzled soft-drinks talking loud, and parents pulling their kids along like unruly lap-dogs and making sure they don’t get hit by oncoming traffic and those same kids getting distracted by moss on tree-bark, walking every which way except forward, and pointing to decorated yards with a skeleton hanging by a noose from a tree, a tombstone, or zombies, bat, spiders, or a home with the candy-giver-outers dressing as Frankenstein and his bride, well needless to say most people keep their eyes on eye level and if you’re not even an eighth of an inch tall no one really sees you.

Except for her. Blonde, long and beautiful. Beaming eyes. Beaming smile. The dark of the night was no match for her light.

And I guess that’s how she saw me. You know, her light flickering off my metal catching her eyes that burn with eternal intelligence like the stars of the sky.

She was with her little cousin. The latter dressed as Cinderella. They walked towards me. And I caught her eye.

I don’t know how to tell you. But her glance. Her glance. It’s like time stops. You’re submerged underwater. Everything gone. Except her. And that’s enough. For with her you are whole. And coming from a quarter, a fraction, that means everything. One- it isn’t the loneliest. But the loveliest.

And she stooped down, one hand holding that of her cousins, the other grasping for me. Like a divine hand. For a divine scene. An ascension. And the hand came down. And graced me.

I say graced for it was graceful. But not in the sense of ballet or painting or poetry, the rouge of humanity, but the raw of nature. The crack of thunder. A burst of lightning. Power. And light. Nature. Graceful- in and of itself a singular existence.

And the electricity of that hand so lithe and delicate. I then understood the ecstasy of a Saint.

And she held me. Stood up. And placed me in her pocket.

And that is how I ended up in the pocket of a Dime.

When a quarter is in your pocket, he sleeps. But in her pocket I didn’t sleep, because how are you supposed to sleep in the pocket of a Dime?

And I didn’t sleep. For a whole week. Not even when she left me face up in the cupholder of her car. Because that car so smelt of her. A unique smell. Not even that of a perfume, but of a flower. And that scent kept me awake and I burned and surged with the fiery electricity of her image. My internals aligned to be the notched arrows of drawn bows all irrevocably aimed at her. And her beauty.

Every trip she took to school, to back home, to church, to the grocery- there isn’t even a word for it. Correct. Right. Fate. The singularity of my existence. A sun, to my solar-system. Has one thing ever made you fully happy? I hope so. For there is nothing like it.

I could harp on her for hours. But that is not a story. Only the heart of a disk of metal.

Less than a week after picking me up she got in her car and drove, down a country road, to take a right, another right. And then to turn into the second house on the left. She pulled up to the front door. And the door opened. A boy about the Dime’s age walked out. And opened the car door, and sat in the passenger seat.

He wore a green flannel-shirt, jeans, and boots. His eyes were grey like steel, like quarters, but freckled in a kaleidoscope way with every color of the spectrum. He grinned at the Dime, with such enthusiasm and unfiltered zeal that it was evident that he felt the same as me in regards to the girl. He understood her. Himself. 

And me. I felt inextricably bound to him.

He opened his mouth to say to the Dime what I had been thinking for the past week, “My, do you look beautiful.”

The Dime looked at him insecurely like he was crazy. Like he was wrong and nuts and full of it. She glanced modestly down at the floor board and whimpered a thank-you. They pulled out of his driveway and talked like best friends. And they were. I had never seen a human-being like either of them. And thus it was clear they were meant for one another, for this evening, and for me to witness. And I realized then I was a spectator of something greater than the mundane, or the explainable. Rather fate distilled into a car-ride.

The Dime asked, “How bent are you on getting ice-cream?”

The boy answered, “I’m indifferent. Heck, as long as I am with you, I am happy.”

Yet again his flattery shook-up the Dime. It was cute. She responded, “Good. Because I just had frozen yogurt this afternoon.”

The boy asked, as the Dime turned right, “Then what will we do? Oh, the river?”

“Yes, the river.”

And I watched them talk on the long, winding, and rustic drive down to the river. One could hardly call it conversation, but something more like art. For it was effortless, and predetermined, fated. Their hearts and minds turned in unison like the gears and cogs of the minting machines back in Denver. I savored every second like it was a dream bound to vanish. And dreamlike it was. As the evening sun waned over the horizon, the skin of them both glowed, their eyes twinkled. This was nothing less than a dance of the constellations before my eyes.

And then we arrived. The Dime pulled into a gravel lot just feet away from the bank of a long, and slow river. And parked.

For miles around them, there was not another living soul.  

And I try to recall what they say, and write it as they said it. But I can’t. Just can’t. For the letters of this language no matter how permutated or combined cannot yield the longing the two had in their voices, the tension and desire between them. For in the air hung a silent crescendo, building, building, and building. Growing to a size, to a point, to an end so great I could not possibly predict. For how can paper and pen express a moment in which the entirety of nature was conducted by the heavens?

The boy said when she parked, “Look, I’m sorry. Lately I’ve been an ass. And given the fact you’ve just, well you know, broke up with him just, what, five days ago, I’ve shirked my duties as a best friend.”

Answering, the Dime said, “It’s alright. You’re still the best. I’m just glad we are here tonight.”

“Right back at you. Yes, indeed. It is wonderful, isn’t it? You know, sometimes I wonder how we got here. The pass months have flown. Or almost fallen. One-way concrete streets. And here we are. Remember every call? Every text? The days when we would dream of one another, with our eyes closed? How many times we thought it would be like to kiss? My God our desire. And we are here.” The boy then left a pause. And a comfortable one. They inhaled and exhaled in unison. Then he spoke, with curious trepidation, “Remember that one time we said we would flip a coin to see if we should kiss one another?”

Nearly having read his mind, the girl had already reached for me, right in the cupholder. “Yes, yes I do.” Displaying me she said with alacrity, “I have a quarter right here. Do you want to?”

“Why not,” he asked.

Before I knew it she had me on her thumb-nail, poised to be jettisoned.

“Heads we kiss. Tails we don’t,” declared the boy.

“Here we go,” said the Dime.

And I was launched. Spinning. Lurching. I saw the halls of Heaven and the bowels of Hell blend into one, spinning, spinning, spinning. Which would it be?

I landed on the boy’s half-erect crotch, to slide down in between his thighs.

They both giggled. And the boy reached, and grabbed me. He looked.

“Heads.”

“Of course.”

I was put back into the cup-holder, face up.

The Dime and the boy looked at one another. The boy laughed out of sheer nervousness. The girl, out of modesty, followed suit. So the boy changed the conversation. And he talked. But more or less rambled. And he sounded crazy. Yet his words and thoughts were shockingly sane and lucid. Infallibly sweet. And the Dime just stared at him, her solid-blue eyes begging the question as to why in the world he had not kissed her already.

I distinctly remember the boy looking at her profile, as she gazed out to the river, and making a motion as if tugged to his destiny, closer towards her, hands almost reaching out, only for him to regain sense of his faculties and sit upright in the seat. “Do you ever feel as if you are getting pulled by strings?”

“Like something is controlling you? Like other people make your decisions?”

“No, not quite,” he replied, “but more as if the strings of my heart pull me. As if my soul bounds out of me and points to where I should be and what I should be doing. I mean, just a moment ago, I, I almost had to kiss you.”

Yet the girl was chained to a rock of inhibition. So too was the boy. Their faces and bodies were dissonant. Their eyes alight and free, but bodies rigid like unfit prisons. Like birds in cages did the desire of their hearts fly.

So the boy just kept on talking. For minutes upon minutes.

And then it broke.

The Dime turned, grabbed his face with her hands so long and graceful, and pressed her lips against his; the electricity of it all struck the boy like lightning, yet without missing a beat did his shock turn into enthusiasm and he wrapped his muscled arms around her delicate waist and pressed her body against his with such ferocious passion that the entire moment combusted into a heat so powerful and all-consuming that every inch of the world burst into a single flame as to remove itself from existence and to alight a moment so terrific and fantastical that the Dime an the Boy were consumed; and the Dime latched on to the top button of his shirt, grabbing a fistful of the flannel, and they climbed to heavens, their hearts and chests swelling with the magical air of that second and caressing and grasping did they themselves remove themselves from terra firma- an imperfect world; with beautiful desperation did the two cling to one another; with such fervor did they race to heaven; every hand, every touch, every movement of their lips, was a vociferous chant of ad astra; their eyes closed; oh to what I would pay to see the images which burst upon the backs of their eyelids; for every move of the former was anticipated by the latter and in synchronization did they discover love and beauty and passion and fire, and the works of the Creator himself; and they breathed the same air; their hearts beat the same beats; for it was naturally graceful; like a thunderbolt, the moment, it erupted; the heat and the light slowly transforming into sound, vibration, an explosion; a force so profoundly deep that it rocked every iota of their existence, every fiber of themselves, reshaping, reweaving, remaking reality; they did not move as two, but as one; in the most essential way did their mortal bodies fuse as to immortalize love itself.

They inhaled and exhaled in unison. The bridges of their noses meeting, mouths hardly an inch apart. I saw them look into one another’s eyes.

His simply shined with happiness. They grey glinting with every color- violet and green, yellow and red.

But hers, so limpid and blue I swear I could see her soul. She worried with eyes almost ready to cry. What was this moment to be? She feared the future; felt forlorn rather than fervor for the fortuitous fruition of the finest desires of their hearts.

As if to tell her not to fret, the boy placed his index upon the delicate chin of the Dime, lifted it to meet her lips with his, and traced down her neck, across her collar bone, under her arm, and around her back, in a manner so gentle and ethereal that simply melted into his arms. And once again she was his, and he was hers.

The world was theirs.

And I believed they discovered infinity. For that moment for them was whole, a circle, a ring encompassing the dreams of their mind and wishes of their hearts.

Yet of course they had to stop.

Catching his breath, the boy almost sung, “That was perfect.”

“Yes, it was,” answered the Dime.

And then they held hands as she drove back to drop him off at his house.

And they kissed at the beginning of his driveway. And kissed twice more before he got out, wishing her a goodnight.

And as she drove home I saw her change. The glorious happiness in which she so fully indulged herself in down by the river was replaced by worry. Of having her heart so open. Of living out life on the flip of a coin.

And I guess this somehow fermented by chance into insecurity, and insecurity into intolerance for the unknown, and this intolerance into an abhorrence for chance, and an abhorrence for chance into anger towards the boy- her best friend. Because it is likely that by chance he said something dumb. Or did something dumb. And really pissed her off. 

Because four days later the Dime was back with her old boyfriend. Back to certainty. And I don’t think that is even worth a Penny.

Perhaps this is the way it should be.

Perhaps not.

Regardless, it is or was fate.

And quarters, just like humans, are instruments of it.

That night, a string-quartet. Me, the Dime, the boy, and fate. Can we even choose to play another piece? And if so, who writes it? 

Should we meet this question with a smile or a frown?