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enjoy this Kyle Hemmings writing in the free April 2013 PDF file chapbook I Was Charles Bronson’s Secret Hostage				You can also order this as a 2013 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book I Was Charles Bronson’s Secret Hostage

Substitute for Love #2

Kyle Hemmings

    She doesn’t say she will never love him as in hot sleepless nights by the old train tracks, or her dreaming of some bad boy, brooding, mumbling, his sexy animal inarticulateness. With him, there will be no bruised skin over a deep wound. She likes the little man who butters his bread with his left hand, and smiles when she’s withholding an embarrassing answer. Why hurt anyone who gives gifts of salt water taffy and tiny sculptures of Parisian dance hall girls? Most of his questions hint at depth, the ability to not breathe for long periods of time, the risk of losing things.

     Sometimes on a sticky star-studded night, he looks up at the sky and remarks that we are surrounded by so much space. Yet what are we to do? When she finally breaks down and tells him about the man who cut her so deep that she bled from bed to bed, that some kinds of love, like his, are too precious, too fragile to be questioned, he tries to hold her and he is off balance. She steadies him. Her embrace is stronger, more encompassing. She listens to his faint heartbeat, feels his spongy bones. Whatever is left is her own space, an enormous room where she dances en pointe and keeps falling, keeps breaking that same tiny bone in her ankle.

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