I was quickly photographed, fingerprinted and then shoved into the holding cell with all the other detainees. They let me sit there for the remaining six hours while all the assholes who have jobs pushing others around stood there staring back at me like they knew something I didn’t. I was furious, humiliated, innocent and alone when I left. I wanted to tell them to fuck-off as I hit the last step outside the Precinct doors, but chose to squint at the blasting sun immediately penetrating my eyes. It was seven o’clock in the morning and I was at my mental limit when I unconsciously chose to sprint home with my make-up caked and smeared, hair tussled with some dried grass remains and my left high heel broken off.

On the street my mind swam, my body wildly rowing down the river streets of Manhattan panting without end, steaming mad, and getting faster by blocks end. By night I stumble through the desire for something days don’t offer, rowing passed the rocks showing me the right way, never seeing them, never to be the lone Indian who would know to be guided that way. How can I see the rocks when my head listens to the noise of loneliness? The black dark divides me when I turn the light out alone. Why a pillow and bed, the ceiling above me? Why the appeal of breath warming your ear and hair, knees that touch reminding you of the other person’s belonging? I’ve created a quiet life, but live with a riotous mind, searching for the one thing that no one can give me and that one thing I probably wouldn’t want. Desire is what got me this crooked walk home.

My husband, James, is a writer living off his fourth and fifth edition novels that summarized his days of youthful hard drinking along the Chilean coast. We met in Puerto Rico and married after his last novel and have been together during his dry spell and poor attempts at writing small time nonfiction books of no consequence. We’d always lived on an icy patch we called love, or marriage, but today I only thought about my liberation from the love I no longer craved from James.

When James drilled me about where I’d been all night I had stronger bones and more need to flip my red shawl in his face than I ever imagined, or the night before could offer. So I seized the drilling to tell my husband about my out-of-sequenced overly embellished night’s romp using loud, seething, instant, meaningless words with no blinking anywhere.

After James’ repeated urgings, I read the kitchen calendar notations he’d written in big red mushroomed letters. He strongly reminded me that the, “Saturday night, opening night, your play,” did not include getting arrested afterwards. But the notation for Sunday morning, “Dad’s funeral at St. Rita’s Church,” the one which he punctuated, bordering on gloating, did make me turn to remind him that I had remembered something like that. Like the fact that his father had died last week.

I cooked and ate a warm breakfast with James. He looked straight down and chewed moving inwards and outwards of the plate. When he finally looked at me, I was certain he would say, “some swine are prey, some are quarry, and some eat at the same trough,” and get up and leave the table, but he didn’t. He sat back still and contented like a rabbit softly folded up. I set plates before us and a cup of cold water for him. One set lain in front of a swine for my husband’s perusal, the other for the innocent rabbit betrayed by the swine. I knew I had been through a lot the night before, but one look at his creviced face and I knew he’d been through a grief much worse than mine. The silence between us set the sun in the room so I no longer could see the soft rabbit before me, though I knew he was there with ears-up, knowing danger was near.

James stood up and went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. He pulled off his pajamas seemingly without unbuttoning or untying and dropped them into the trash can and not in the hamper. He breathed angrily in perfect intervals like hemmed stitching. Still I did nothing to console him just moved to avoid him as necessary.

I walked to the funeral hall lagging well behind James’ early arrival and got there after many of the guests and mourners were seated and most of the squawking was over. I waited outside and smoked a cigarette and thought about the black stallion called independence that was set loose to run through me now that I had no love for James.

I knew about the salty part of me that knew no family, no need to volunteer to be happy under daylight. I gazed up at the church bell’s calling me to mass, but chose to skim my shoe across the cement back and forth, blow out smoke and study my nails. The bells did not call for me, they called for those who cared to be there. I knew James was inside safely nestled between his families shoulders and would not notice the church was absent of my night running presence.