"Today"

Best friend Best friend Best friend B––

Toddy paused. The pencil dangled between his fingers, the feeble tink-tink-tink of its stubby tip against the miniature, wooden desk shriveling in the silence of the cramped cellar. Behind the desk, Toddy sat alone, one foot perched on the stool. Through a drawer-sized window opposite to the desk, the darkness of the maturing night crept into the room. Prowling, it gorged on the dust and devoured the pale, peeling walls and mangled the worn, concrete floor and shelves of decade-old wine. Mischievously, it nibbled at the edges of the faint globe of light squeezed out by the lamp, slumped on the desk.

Sitting back in his chair, Toddy traced the letter “e” in the air. He paused. Then he traced the letter “o.” He paused again, then continued writing.

est friend Best friend Best––

“What’s my frisky baby doing in here?” A teenage girl pounced into the cellar, slamming the door behind her and flinging her arms around Toddy’s neck. He cringed, at her fingernails digging into his shoulders, at her slobbery smooches sliming the back of his neck, at her shrill voice ricocheting off the cellar walls and needling into his skin. There was no way he could keep writing, so he clutched the pencil to his chest, curled into a ball on his chair, squeezed his eyes shut and tried to hide his head and thoughts from the beast outside. The girl pried his eyes open and brought her eye to within an inch to his: “Did you miss me, Toddy? Do you still love me? It’s your Esther! Or your Esty, or your girlfriend, or your wife-to-be or your babe or your HOT-ROD L-O-V-E-R, but really I just love it when you call me your Esther!” She let go of his eyelids and bounded into the air, again and again, furiously clapping her hands like a deranged seal and giggling as she twirled around the cellar.

Toddy, cracking open one eye, peered at Esther spinning and howling like a demented mutt, and he relaxed in his chair. Excreting from his mind the thought that he had never called Esther “Esty” or any of those things she had mentioned––except maybe “girlfriend,” once upon a time––Toddy focused back on the paper in front of him. It was one of dozens scattered across his desk, on all of which he had scribbled unruly arrays of Best friend’s. On some pages, the Best friend’s were so faint only a few individual letters were legible, and on others the Best friend’s were mere line fragments, their original meaning mauled by Toddy’s pencil’s eraser, which itself had long ago been eaten away by paper and graphite.

But with each phrase, Toddy emboldened his strokes. For him, each letter bore a sort of belonging, as if it was affirming to its singular writer and reader, “I am here because I belong. I am here because this is who I am––”

Like a starved mongrel the girl dashed around the confines of the cellar, screeching, “Ooooo, Toddy, don’t you just wanna get married right now? I would love to get married to you and spend the rest of my life with you and kiss you until my lips get all crinkly like raisins, because I know that even then you’ll kiss me back with your raisiny lips!”

This time, Toddy kept writing. Best friend Best friend Best friend Best friend.

Her fiendish hands strangling each one’s neck, Esther slammed two bottles of decade-old Merlot on the desk, and Toddy jumping in his seat heard the desk’s pitiful wooden frame groan over his knees.

“Well, Toddy, what d’ya say we have a lil fun? It’ll be like our wedding, when we’ll drink champagne freshly made in Pahree or Lion or Marcell or Bordox or wherever they make champagne in France!” Before Toddy could comment that champagne actually originated from Champagne, France, Esther rolled a bottle towards him, which would have shattered on the floor had he not caught it. Placing the bottle back on the desk, he glared back at her, his worried frown pockmarked with disdain. Esther tilted her head and grinned. She cried, “Well, c’mon babe, drink with me!” Her grin warped into an ugly frown as she dug her fingernails into the cork. He parted his lips slightly, wanting to tell her that she shouldn’t drink wine, that she would hurt herself. But he paused, sighed, and turned back to his desk. Best friend Best friend Best friend B––

Toddy hesitated again. His pencil was already tracing the “o” in the air, about to make contact with the paper and drive that letter into reality. But his mind yanked at his veins and arteries and muscles and bones as if they were reins, commanding them not to write the word he had thought and mouthed so many times. He pulled the pencil back to his chest. Then, he looked over at Esther, squealing as she now began to slam the bottle’s neck against the floor to break the top off. Spinning back to the paper in front of him, he condensed into the paper all his disgust at his weakness in all the Best friend’s he had written before. He forced his fingers to finish the word that his lips couldn’t form. The word that in his brain felt vulnerable and hunted.

Boyfriend.

These newborn letters scrounged for their first breaths amongst the hostile horde of Best friend’s. But they were alive. And simply by existing there on paper, they spoke for him.

Toddy took a full, deep breath. He filled up his lungs until they couldn’t hold any more air, and then he propelled it all out into the cellar. Toddy was alive.

Esther slammed the bottle onto the desk, splattering decade-old wine across the Best friend’s and staining the newborn Boyfriend. “What’s all this shtuff, Toddy?” she slurred. Toddy glanced at the bottle––about a third of its contents were gone already. “Ya know, this shtuff tastes really weeelly bad, but it makes you feel so goooood, dya know? Like you’re flying up and up and up and never stoppin’! Oh, c’mon Toddy, have some with me! It’s really not dat baaaad, I promisss.” She thrust the bottle forward, splashing more wine onto the desk. “Ooopsie,” she whispered, giggling and snorting uncontrollably.

Toddy stared at the wine sinking into the cracks of the desk, and then he looked up at Esther’s face, contorted with intoxicated bliss. With a squeal and scrunch of her nose, she bounded forward, grabbed his face in her hands, dug her thumbs into the corners of his lips and jerked them apart into a smile. “I wanna see you SUH-MILE, Toddee babee! Smile smile smile smile smile!” she screeched. Each “smile” twisted into more of a growl than a squeal.

Toddy lurched his head away and shoved Esther off him. Then he picked up the pencil and began to furiously write. Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend.

He wrote over the wine-stained spots so hard that the soggy paper tore and some of his words dug into the desk but he just kept writing. Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend.

The letters were no longer faint, no longer newborn. They paraded across the paper in defiant print. Each word darkened as it became more familiar to Toddy’s writing hand, so familiar that he began to whisper them, breathing even more life into them.

“Awwww, Toddee, are ya writin’ bout usss? Of coursss you’re my bestie, of course you’re my B-O-Y-F-R-I-E-N-D I love you Toddeee my boyfriend!” She flung her arms around him again, but Toddy kept writing: Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend. Esther poked his cheek and cooed, “Toddy, look at me. Babeee, look at meee.”

Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend.

“Babe I said look at me,” she said more brusquely.

Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend.

“Okay, I dunno why you’re bein’ so unfun right now, Toddy! Like, like why are you even writin’ ‘Best friend’ and ‘Boyfriend’? I know you’re my best friend and my boyfriend, so you can stop it now,” she huffed.

Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend Boyfriend.

Esther grabbed a bundle of Toddy’s papers and flung them into the air. She picked up another pile and shredded them. She shrieked, “Stop it, babe, or I’m gonna––I’m gonna rip up all your papers! Stop writing and look at me and tell me you love me or else I’m gonna destroy every single one!”

Toddy’s hand steadied, and his handwriting became slower and more deliberate. The letters marched in clean cursive lines across the paper as they traversed the bumpy, burgundy terrain of the stained page.

Boyfriend. Boyfriend. Boyfriend.

With a guttural screech, Esther scooped up all Toddy’s papers. She suffocated the words he had written as she crushed the papers in her arms. She grabbed the open bottle of wine and flung its remaining contents on the papers and all around the cellar. She drowned his words and stomped on the wet papers with both her feet, smearing the wine and drenched, mutilated sheets into the cellar floor.

With pages of Best friend’s and one page of Boyfriend’s sinking to the floor around her, Esther stopped, bottle in hand. The room, for once, fell silent. Limp remains of Toddy’s words stuck lifelessly to Esther’s hands. Toddy stayed seated and didn’t move. Esther dropped the bottle of Merlot onto the ground, and it shattered. The little red wine left spilled out across the floor. Her hands trembled. Staring at the wall, Esther asked, her voice stony and dull, “Toddy––” She paused. The syllables of his name stumbled agonizingly into the silence of the room, as if they were in a different language. She choked out, “Toddy, are you––are you––?”

He didn’t need to look at her to see the paralyzing shock of the realization squeezing her eyes shut. He didn’t need to look at her to see the fear of his response to her question pinching her lips together. He didn’t need to look at her to feel her teeth masticating the last word of her question, unable to squeeze it out into the stale air of the cellar. He had been there before. Unable to look at himself. At who he had become––or who he had always been, he wasn’t sure.

“My Esther. My Yesterday. My love. I––”

The door clicked shut. Toddy looked up, and Yesterday was gone. Now, the darkness rose again and shrieked. It shredded his unheard words and mauled the desk lamp’s faint glow. It pounced at him from all directions, its innumerable eyes seething with contempt, teeth bared, claws outstretched.

Toddy let it come. Let its jaws snap, its claws slash. Let it dive through him. Let it whimper and moan as it padded off into the rest of the room. Let it starve.

He was no prey.

The unopened bottle of Merlot lay helpless on its side amongst the shattered, gory remains of its sister bottle. Wine aged for more than a decade and worth hundreds of dollars lay in puddles on the floor. The tiny desk still stood, damp with red wine. Scraps of saturated, burgundy paper littered the room, the Best friend’s and Boyfriend’s illegible or disintegrated. But those words now resided not on fragile paper but on his tongue. They were alive.

Toddy sat still in his chair and turned over in his head what had just happened. In the darkness Yesterday had left behind, the bitter cold of the cellar was beginning to sink into his skin. Toddy figured that wearing no clothes would be warmer than wearing his wine-soaked ones, so he stripped down to just his underwear and settled back on the chair. Hours passed, and he remained there, curled into a ball, head and arms between his knees, feet perched on the edge of the chair seat. Waiting. Toddy wanted to tell him that he had broken up with Yesterday. That he was ready for him now. But would he come? Toddy kept waiting.

Eventually, an amber cloud of light wafted through the narrow window, slicing through the decaying darkness. It traced up his thighs to his exposed ribs and naked chest. It caressed the bare skin of his collarbone, and then his cheek, leaving a faint shimmer in its path. He blushed. Toddy uncurled his body and looked up at the window––the night had finally retreated. The cramped cellar relaxed with the light of dawn, a new day. And dawn had brought somebody along with it.

A gentle knock on the door fluttered into the room. Toddy jerked his head towards the door and scrambled up from the chair to face the knocking. His skin, stiff with the cellar cold, thawed under the tender, soothing breath of dawn. In the chilling silence of the cellar, Toddy’s words, a crescendoing aubade, flitted to the door.

Tom, Tomorrow, is that you? It’s me, Toddy. It’s Today.

He turned the doorknob––

Tomorrow, I think I––

And pulled back the cellar door.