Second Chance Ranch — Barbara Kennedy

You build your world around someone, and then what happens when they disappear? Where do you go-into pieces, into atoms, do you fly blindly into the arms of another man? You go shopping; you go to the movies, and art galleries, to a friend's home for dinner. You work odd hours. Do you make love to someone else? Someone you hardly know? Consider the hours, the days spent in this room, imagining myself to be the vase on the window ledge, the chair sheltering cautiously under the desk, to be the sulfur head of an exploding match, the shattered lead ripped out of the broken pencil on the floor. If you squint your eyes, you think you see him again, but he's never there. It's only his spirit, a memory, that's what's there under the bed when you kiss someone else. It's in your coffee cup, in your bath water, in your tears. And it will always make you cry. Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you, and a man who swears he'll love you forever isn't finished with you until he's done.