Preface.3

"I don't see you for who you are any more. I see you for who you once were and that pisses me off." The last words he'd said to her were calm by comparison with the thoughts he had at stopped lights revving his engine louder and louder, desperately trying to drown out the anxious babble. Each thought another raindrop pinging like a bullet off the metal roof. The thoughts he trapped under his tongue were gunshots ricocheting around in his skull now. "You judge me and that makes me want to judge you back worse. I want to fuck other women. I hate the way you get the hiccups every time you brush your teeth. Your ass is so fucking huge. I want a sane relationship with a sane person. You're an asshole. Grow the fuck up!" How would she receive him?

Preface.2

Raindrops like rats, scurrying to escape the flood, he thought. We should all be so lucky. He drove on, unafraid. Only a lunatic would be on the road on a night like this. He ignored the implication, instead focusing on the bobs and weaves he used to try and glimpse the road ahead. "The faster I get through this the better," he said out loud. Plus, she's waiting, at the other end of all this. How would she receive him? He tried not to imagine, but his imagination was faster.

Preface.1

Inside, it is a maze of streets, a city with no governance, a state without a state bird, a country with no real borders. Inside him. Inside her. Coarsing through veins, capilaries and arteries, a blue and white Peugot drives erratically, skidding around turns, lurching to stop only at traffic lights. But impatiently, revving the engine with a heavy foot not in one continuous push but with aggressive stabs and murmuring pauses like the groans from a resistantly dying man. It is pouring rain, the kind that falls in expansive sheets horizontally. The windshield wipers cut back and forth, revealing eyes of black with yellow slits. Or is it just the way the light from street lamps plays across this darkened face through the drops of water on the windshield? PARAGRAPH END