Page 19 of Rhymes with Metaphor
Reg checked his phone.“Yes.”
“I’ve been asleep for...”
“Eleven hours,” said Reg.He got up, went to the kitchen, and pulled a sandwich and a bottle of ginger beer out of the fridge.When he brought them back to Joel, he found him lying prone on the settee, asleep again.Reg rearranged the blanket to cover him properly.
Reg quietly transcribed the notes from his wall, the bathroom mirror, the business cards, and the takeout bag, then went into his office to arrange them into a cohesive poem that would hopefully mollify the chair.
When it became clear that Joel wasn’t going to wake up imminently, Reg ate the sandwich and polished off the ginger beer.As he set the bottle down, he got a text from Flip:
Fuck you, then.
Joel woke seven hours later, bleary-eyed and looking terrible, and Reg drove him home.The hot chocolate, now cooled, was still in the car’s cupholder.Reg offered it to him, but Joel stared through the windshield, expression blank, and didn’t respond.Reg suspected missed sleep wasn’t the only thing wrong with him.
Not that it was any of his business.
Chapter 5: Mollifying the Chair
The departmental chairwasn’t mollified by “Little Moses.”Not one bit.
“You’ve written a page,” said the chair.“In a week.”
Properly speaking, Reg had written a poem in a day—the day he’d taken Joel in from the rain—and nothing since.
The chair was now threatening to make him meet with her every day for the next ten days until he produced ten more poems.Which wasn’t the least bit helpful to Reg, and after figuratively banging his head against the literal brick walls of his loft for the past week, Reg had booked a tiny attic room at M.House, the studio building in town where artists went to get laid, stoned, and, not in that order, inspired.Which was where Reg was now, eating some exceptionally stale crackers and attempting to pen a poem about setting a chair on fire.
This was where Martin ran him to ground.
“Has it ever occurred to you to switch on your phone?”said Martin.“I’ve been calling you for days.”
“That’s rich, coming from the man who’s been AWOL for most of April,” said Reg.
“I’ve been with Juliet.You don’t have my excuse.”
“Is this ticking-off in aid of anything?”said Reg.
“Have you got anything on for the next week?”
