Zizi and BooBoo

 He picks the olive from the glass, examines it with sweaty cleanpicked fingers.  He orders his martinis dry, always dry.  He squints at the obstinate red pit.  She squints in bored emulation.  What else to do - the airport terminal bustling like a negative void, all the going and all the coming cancelling each other out, all just steps, in step.  An equation of ambivalent addition and aggressive substraction that collapses into a barstool, where she watches steps march through the terminal one two three two one zero.  Dry, always dry,

       she thinks, watching a blond child with toothgaps large enough to amplify a shrill voice, screamlaughing towards the gate – because what else to do, remembering youth and its false-eternal tingle of odyssey.  Everything was bigger then, she thinks, I grew and the world shrunk one two three

                       four two he sips glass and complains about matters within the realm of dollar signs.  She juggles her mildewed napkin between her fingers and thinks how in school she used to strike the dash across the moneyemptied “s” aggressively, almost violently, like a counterfeit threat.  An afterthought after numbers.  Now dry always dry

as waterfeigned alcohol seeps over his proudpouting lip.  Are you listening he injects but she imagines the bear of her childhood, the babygurgle name she christened it, how she was a radiant abstraction when her budding arms held it, and time marched forward two four six and she left him outside the terminal because her parents whisked her up out because late because time marches forward twelve twentyfour fortyeight and her mother teased her about the tears

she stares unseeing at her drink stares dry always dry fully filled and empty

are you listening he repeats a marcher stops and gazes self-aware embarrassed but for no one zero zero

Zizi doesn’t answer