Wasted Words by Karen A. Elizes

Walking into her room, turning on the lamp on the nightstand, he breathed in the pleasant smell of fresh laundry that sat at the foot of her bed. He noticed that she left her iPod on, and instead of turning it off he let the honky-tonk piano of Bobby Zimmerman tamper on with much silenced gusto. Archaic looking library books lay on the bed, hard covered with torn corners and the faint smell of “old” dusted all over. 

The Collected Poetry Of W.H. Auden, History Of English Literature, The Early Writings Of Ezra Pound, and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. He whistled at the reading material he now began thumbing through, its yellowing pages felt dry and powdery between his fingers. 

“Your reading material is s-o-o-o very eclectic, Kay.,” he told her one-day, laying themselves out on the grass of their back yard. She laughed at this as if it were apparent to her but not particularly know-it-all about it He did not mind this, he thought that in a “writers point of view” she had every right to think in that mindset. As modest and humble as she was about her writing and knowledgeable about  “anything and everything”(like her teacher once mentioned), she did have a snobbish way of putting someone on if she sensed them to be a waste of her time; and he liked this about her. Being able to defend something or someone with the right facts to prove it.

“Look, its not like I say things to fill the air, otherwise I’d be doing a lot of bad. There’d be no point to talking. It’s like polluting our very planet! The scary thing about that is, people do it all the time.”

She pointed to the sky and they both looked up. Spring was headed their way, and the sun shone bright, but the cold breeze raised the hairs on their arms, stinging their cheeks and slowly drying their lips. 

“Environmentalists think its exhaust and chemical waste that’s causing this global warming?”  Popping a mandarin slice into her mouth, and in between chewing, continued.

“No, its people and their gad-damn wasted words, filling the sea and drifting into the Arctic Ocean, breaking down icebergs, and melting the ozone!” She raised her hands and boosted her voice in a theatrical gesture, and pursed her lips together.

He laughed at her humor and threw his face into her neck, inserting warm kisses, then placing his left hand on the slope of her neck as if to keep them there. She fell onto his shoulder, breathing in deeply, setting aside the notion that peoples wasted words have been putting others lives at jeopardy.

She began again. “No, its true Michael. You told me yourself you hated wasted words, now look, it’s killing you this very second.”

They both laughed and sighed into silence, laying his head on her lap. She looked down at him and smiled.

“There’s that smirk of yours, what are you thinking?” She stroked his hair back.

“Nothin’, just wonderin’ how much damage William Faulkner did with ‘The Sound and The Fury’.