Tomorrow

Micah kept a list of bargains folded in his wallet like a saint card or a torn page from some minor prophet. Five items; five coins of himself, traded away to keep one bright thing lit.

First he sold the watch his father had left him, the tick had begun to sound like a judge’s gavel, or his own heart unable to speak. Next, a box of photographs he never looked at because they made his chest feel like winter. Music followed. Then the leather jacket that used to walk him home through the rain. Last, the ring from the year he thought he could be good, a covenant he’d broken with himself.

All of it was pawned for rent, for pills, for the thin safety of tomorrow. All of it was given up to defend the single dark pleasure left: the right to choose his own ruin, or his own rescue.

Micah told himself he’d decide in the morning. He always chose a morning that hadn’t been born yet. If I’m still alive, he thought. If time is bored enough to sit with me a little longer, I’ll make up my mind. It was like rehearsing a confession to an empty room; you grow eloquent when no one is listening.

Sometimes he thought there was a sixth thing; something he had sold without knowing the price, like Esau parting with his birthright for a single hunger, a trade made in the dark before dawn. Maybe the cross he’d kept from his brother, maybe the way he used to whistle in stairwells just to hear himself come back. Some small blessing meant for him that slipped his grasp.

The mornings Micah chose all had names; Monday, Friday, the one with the pink light, but none of them arrived. They hovered like annunciations that never quite descended, like the hour before dawn; the wolf hour. Sometimes he dreamed of standing at a bus stop while the sun refused to rise, oblivion fading into grey.

When he slept, Mara arrived. Without a knock, she manifested the way music did, a door without hinges opening. She smelled faintly of rain, of the quiet after thunder. Like the women who brought messages no one asked for, only mercy. When she spoke, her voice sounded like it was being remembered. It wasn’t language so much as a heartbeat; a translation of small mercies into syllables his body understood.

Mara pressed her forehead to his, a gesture older than prayer, older than oil on his brow, and he felt photographs developing behind her eyes: silver halides, blue specters. When she closed them, the world printed itself somewhere warm: street lamps blurring, a tide washing over a city he’d never seen. Micah wondered if angels ever learned to speak in photographs instead of fire. He wanted to live inside those images. Not as a lover or a savior, just a detail that endured. The bird on a wire. Footprints that never filled with water.

“I’m still sick,” Micah warned, because warning felt like virtue. The illness had no name and needed none. It was the heaviness in his lungs, the bitter tang of morning, the self that hissed when he opened the blinds. Breathing was a chore he resented. He suspected he would always resent it. Yet Mara held the air between them until it tasted of fruit instead of rust. Not a healing, just a weather change, the kind they said Agatha sent before storms. Mara didn’t promise health; only a high window, rain that didn’t soak through, the proof of wind in a curtain’s small dance. Micah believed that might be enough. If he was still alive.

Outside, the city kept its indifferent pulse: someone dragging bottles to the curb; a siren passed, unapologetic. The radiator sighed, tired. They lived between these sounds, making a small religion of endurance, like beads in faith left unnamed.

On Wednesdays they sat in the laundromat, candy-colored by machine light. There was a man who came each week with only one shirt. They had watched him for months. Mara wondered if he was laundering his grief. Micah thought the shirt must belong to someone who was gone. They never asked. They let the machines translate the story for them, one spin at a time. It reminded Micah of the old purification baths; water turning and turning.

Mara watched the clothes whirl; Micah watched her eyes follow them. It was their poor man’s cinema. She said every spin was a story; shirt and sock became strangers, then kin, then strangers again. He asked what story he was. The drum kept turning.

“You’re a quarter someone keeps putting back into the machine,” Mara said. “Not because you buy anything, because the sound you make when you drop, that part of the sound is hope.” Mara smiled. “Like the widow’s mite.”

Micah didn’t know how to answer, so he joked that he’d give her the sun if his pockets were big enough. Mara said she didn’t want the sun; she wanted him to stop hoarding the night as if it were his only inheritance. He nodded like a good student and stole the night anyway. He brought it to her in armfuls. “Here”, he said, “Let’s pin this dark to the ceiling so nothing else can fall on us.”

Mara hummed, thinking. “All right, but let’s cut some holes in it, for stars.” And the darkness gathered, and the light came through, and it was good.

When the fear was worst, she let him hold her face like it was a bowl full of ocean. He drained it gently, the way Noah watched the waters fall; slow, stubborn, finally merciful. She never cried; he refused to let it become tears. It had to change: steam from their kitchen pasta, sweat on their wrists as they danced to a radio station that only played the tempo of a heart relearning rhythm. Micah swore he could hold every tide she carried. He swore until the swearing turned to worship. I will be the one to help you dream.

Before sleeping, they checked the locks twice, turned the cups upside down as if to keep his ghosts from drinking first. Mara sang a fragment. Micah listened, thinking how every act of care was also a spell against disappearance. On the counter, an unopened envelope waited, pale against the dark. His mammy used to say unopened letters hold a future in captivity; was that the fate of his soul once he released it from his flesh? He’ll open it tomorrow.

They did dream, but not the grand kind. Small dreams like winter harvest: a bed that didn’t sag to the floor, a plant that survived April, a library card without late fees. His body held its heat through sleep. Her laughter returned from the walls not as echo but as chorus, the sound having learned its lines and wanting to join in.

Sometimes the dream was only this: morning arrived, and they were both still here, and the apartment remembered them.

Micah tried to imagine forever, but forever collapsed into the sharp present of bus schedules, traffic lights, the way Mara’s thumb drew figure-eights on his wrist when his breath faltered. So he changed the word. Not forever. Again. As Ruth said to Naomi; not eternity, just Where you go, I will go.

He wanted again, the daily choosing. To be chosen in return, not as penance or salvation but as the steady weight on one end of a seesaw that kept the other from striking dirt. He wanted their image not to burn out. He wanted to be a face caught on film so many times it became a place, a small, unburning place, they could escape to.

One night Micah unfolded the list of bargains. The wallet smelled of dryer lint and cinnamon gum; remnants of a life too ordinary to be doomed. He smoothed the paper flat and wrote a sixth line: I will stop paying the future with my bones. Somewhere, Ezekiel nodded. He folded it back and said nothing. Not then. He wanted to test it, a spell spoken only once.

When Micah slept, his chest ached the way new wings might. Mara closed her eyes and an image bloomed: two silhouettes on a rooftop no one else used, city lights blinking like polite constellations, their hands sticky from the oranges they ate at midnight. Micah stepped into the picture. It accepted him. The ink didn’t run.

Morning took its time. That was fine. If I’m still alive, he thought, I’ll make up my mind.

But that night he had another sentence: I am.

And when he said it, the room brightened at the edges, as if someone, somewhere, a Name older than day, had stirred.

© E. G. Ware