Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Marble"

“You little paranoid bitch, doesn’t it ever
bother you that you’re incapable of having
relationships? You tell me you “feel awful all
the time,” don’t you think there’s a reason for it?”
Digging in to half a century, on what’s literally
my fiftieth birthday, it occurs to me what a gyp
to whole thing really is, for me, Abby, & the rest—
try to do a little good work, they’ll always find
a reason to hang you. That last time Abby was
splayed out on my floor, once I’d moved into
a less idyllic, low-ceiling’d flat, no sex, just the sense
that the wall between us was insurmountable, on
every level. She left her bike in front of my building.
I spent her tirades composing an answer in my head,

putting her on tape, as she was supposed to be
talking about Mary. She was being naughty, talking
about herself. Late summer, bedraggled, just as this
February day is bedraggled by extreme cold, Plymouth
Meeting under ice-sheets under ice-sheets, the East
Coast gasping for heat. The tapes, precious ones, got
dumped when I moved out here. No getting them
back. Just the sense, on my birthday, that the real
present has to be that I ever heard her voice at all,
in a world full of promising circuits never established,
incendiary matches never made. So Abby felt awful
all the time, and why shouldn’t she? Like everyone
else worth a damn, she missed the ticket to her own
enfranchisement. But the last almost-fuck is now marble.

© Adam Fieled 2026