Thursday evening, again.

           And so we each had trudged our way down those long hallowed hallways, to convene in the innermost reaches of this church's lesser sanctimonial conference rooms; already we had read aloud our inescapable list of rules ¾ the whole damn dozen ¾ to make official this weekly event, and now we were sitting out the silence on a faded cluster of lump-stuffed sofas and cram-padded chairs, twenty-or-so men and women somberly arranged in a circular square on the thriftier props beneath us; and we were all being quiet as churchmice, if hardly as fidgety, most of us attempting a calmer appearance ... as if we mice had strayed into a gathering of ravenous cats and would now like to be less than conspicuous; and our visual escapes had ended largely at the floor, where twenty-or-so pairs of assorted footwear were mostly at rest on the outer tattered fringes of a truly vintage carpet; yet the many flitting gazes had also interacted with the random lamps and tables, even the jumble of wall-hangings, including Christ in formed plastic, and Christ in carved wood, and a water-colored Christ leaking blood in crimson trickles from under a crown of brownish thorns; and our twenty-or-so gazes had gone often to the door, and to the wall-clock beside it, a clock with no numbers but with hashmarks to tell us anyway it was now eleven minutes past seven ... and what we were waiting for was a lead-off voice from somewhere among us, some suddenly audible someone who would daringly announce: Hi I'm Cynthia ¾ or whoever among us dared speak ¾ and then the many gazes could flit to the source of this sudden outspokenness, while the more congregational voices among us would gratefully respond: Hi Cynthia Welcome Cynthia Hey Hi Hello Cynthia, to thereby bring relief from the silence and from our edgier silent selves; because then Cynthia ¾ or whoever among us dared speak ¾ would leisurely unload yet another tale of adulterated woe, optionally accentuated with sobs and sadder spasms, about how maybe her Dad, with manic regularity, had been so paternally beyond her reach and yet so eternally out to reach her ... with his eyes and hands, with his wants, his needs; and how the life-plan of Cynthia's grossly overweight Mom had been written in chocolate bonbons and every soapy scene on the daytime tube ¾ versus any kind of family plan ¾ all of which would seem to have left poor Cynthia emotionally pockmarked, having even propelled her into three divorces in her mere thirty-odd years of deflationary life-strugglings, not to mention the sea of human debris that had washed into her abundant life-gaps ¾ before and after, and quite a lot during, each marriage ¾ the many faded hulks of masculine tonnage who over the years had dipped anchor into the depths of her feminine shallows, all those born-again practitioners of the barroom elbow and the bedroom bruise, as if Cynthia's internal guidance system had been programmed toward a closet-man kind of syndrome, because hey ¾ and now her first tentative sob would issue forth upon our ears ¾ because she had always wanted to help, really had felt a need to help, and because hey, well hey, well damn, because damn! because she knew deep down that she cared, really cared! ... about people, you know, and about family, you know, and even if she'd never spent a lot of time ¾ sob, oh God; my God oh sob! ¾ hadn't spent much time at all, you know, tending to the needs of her own two children ¾ spasm of perfected sobs with full nasal rattlings ¾ plus the half-dozen manic step-brats that had impacted into and then out of her life ... it was because hey, well hey, well shit, because shit! ¾ and still bigger sobs ¾ because there was this thing, you know inside, you know, that would not let her be ¾ emphatic gut-wrenching cringe of the upper torso; tears in quantum profusion ¾ and it was this thing, you know, with regularity as great as her father's drunkenness, that had caused sweet Cynthia all through the years to cinch up her Maidenform bra and to troll the local bars for someone she could help really help!

           Except ... and here Cynthia must suddenly pause, must flick her spasms and sobs onto tenuous hold; and now her altered ego would bring into the act an amphibian smile, followed ever so smugly by a lot of shrink-related verbiage, like dysfunctional a lot, and obsessive-compulsive a lot ¾ in relation to herself a lot ¾ then glibly onward into fucking-this and fucking-that a lot, in relation to every man she'd ever encountered, until very soon, sweet Cynthia of old had sunk anew into the mire of her own dampish spasms, prompting someone in this very captive audience to reach out and touch her on the shoulder with a designer box of two-ply Kleenex, and causing every able ear listen up with mass captivation as Cynthia honked her nostrils, followed by this sound-surround conference room surrounding us all too soundlessly and forcing our many gazes to flit with patient anxiousness onto walls-shoes-lamps and Christ in righteous torment ... as twenty-or-so pairs of eyes tried now to out-flit the eyes of the sniveling Cynthia, whose semi-vacant gaze had flitted everywhere but to the clock and who hadn't a clue that it was twenty-six minutes past seven ¾ until at last her hysterics had waxed historic, and again she could grace each face with her amphibian smile, while all too tearlessly telling us: Thanks I Guess That's All I Have To Say Thank You All For Listening, and then this group of Cynthia's foster siblings ¾ for as long as each session shall last ¾ could smile collectively, while gushing forth in singular blurts and nasal murmurs: Thanks Cynthia Hey All Right Cynthia Thank You For Sharing Cynthia ... or whoever among us dared speak.