Karen and Cal Consider Their Future
By J. Zachary Hall

Smoke from Cal's cigarette rides up the folds of the tattered window drape, then bends for the attic where the coffee beans are packed away. "What're you thinking about?" he says.

"Pass two sugars?" Karen says.

"Yes, Sugarplum."

"Thank you." Karen watches her boyfriend's hand now. Steady and white, just under his sleeve, the underside of his wrist, Cal has her initials, K.A., tattooed in thorns that look more like ivy. She tears the sugar, pours it in her coffee. With a knuckle, she presses the hollow of her cheek.

"Tell me what you're thinking," Cal says.

"Why does everything you say sound like it came out of a movie?" Karen says. She knows movies. She knows crossword puzzles and Kant and the Russian novelists, too. She knows the size of her shoe in Italy.

"I want to hijack a plane with you. I want to fly over Bermuda to lose the radars, then parachute down, holding hands."

"Yeah?"

"We'd make babies and watch them play volleyball by a green ocean." Smoke comes out of Cal's nostrils. She can barely see his face with the sun the way it is, so she imagines Bogart on a barstool, gritting handsomely on a Pall Mall.

"They'd have to be tall babies to see over the net," Karen says.

"I'm almost tall. You're almost tall. We have the genes for it."

"Someone peed in my gene pool," Karen says.

"Why did you say that?"

"I heard it on late night TV last night."

"Am I rubbing off on you?" Cal says.

"Maybe."

"Am I leaving a stain?"

"Most likely."

"We'd have stained volleyball babies."

"Yeah?" Karen says. A black showroom truck with gold and red flames breathing down its sides belts past the cafˇ. She thinks the driver might be a Sarasota investor who lost his ass in a hurricane and moved west to chase an Internet beauty. Maybe a Denver banker. Maybe a rancher.

"Are you listening?"

"Sure."

"What did I just say then?"

"What else would we have?" Karen says.

"We'd be in love," Cal says.

"I've heard you say that."

"Don't be mean."

"I just want to know what we have," Karen says. "Shoot me."

"We have two heartbeats and functioning brains."

"I want to know something," Karen says. She has her hands balled in fists. "I want to know what the Cateye Cafˇ on North Tracy has to do with us?"

"What does Bozeman, Montana have to do with us?" Cal says.

"You can't be serious. Your problem is you can't be serious."

"I didn't mean it." Cal grinds his cigarette into the ashtray. He folds his lean arms under the elbows. His shirt gathers in a straight line across his chest. Karen watches the kitchen through the window of the swinging door. There is a coffee cake on the counter, and behind, shaded in white chalk, is a picture of an alley cat in a poet's beret.

"How about a cigarette?" Karen says. "It'd be perfect with my coffee."

"They're too bad for you."

"Please, Cal. Just one."

"Okay. Just one. One cigarette for my former Beauty Queen."

"Second runner-up," Karen says.

"Can I hold your hand?"

"No fucking way."

"Will you spread some of your lipstick on my lips?"

"What do you think?"

"Not ever?" Cal says. "Not never?" He toes the hem of Karen's sarong, rubs his boot along her leg, up near her knee. Karen pushes him away under the covered table. She crosses her legs out in the aisle.

"I'll kiss you hard," Karen says. "I'll kiss you hard when you take me out of Montana at the speed of sound."

"Would you settle for just over the speed limit?" Cal says.

"I don't want to see the Gallatins for at least fifty-two years. They just sit there like a flea market painting. Brown and deep brown and dirty brown knuckles on a dead gray hand."

"You didn't even look out the window," Cal says.

"I didn't have to," Karen says.

"Can I tell you a secret?"

"I thought we didn't have any more secrets."

"This is my last one," Cal says.

"Keep it, then."

"Is that what you want?"

"It's what I want," Karen says. "Tell me when there isn't snow on the ground, and I'll listen. I'll listen when I have a tan and speak perfect Spanish."

"Promise?" Cal says.