laying girl

tacheles drawing

fiction :: night shift

Shelly liked to sit there, reading. She sat through the night shift just fine eating chips or hot dogs and barely keeping an eye on the customers wandering into the store. They were usually tired, bleary men from the neighborhood. Older men with streaked gray hair and baseball jackets.

They were gruff but kind and asked her, Oh, are you sure you're OK here? So late at night? Alone?

And she'd smile indulgently and say, Yessir!

How old are you?

Nineteen, sir!

It's a crime, putting such a pretty young girl like you out here alone!

Smile. It's me the criminals should be afraid of, sir!

As the night came and came, then there would be fewer and fewer people in to mark the time. The flourescent lights made her sight go bad; she'd reread through every issue of 'Teen magazine five times. Or finger through the romance novels, but they were too boring for her. Too dense. The smell of the store which would be nauseating almost after she just walked in faded and she adjusted, and it was if it weren't there. Nothing was there.

A whole hour would pass, and then she'd glance up, blinking, and realize it was gone forever.

If there were criminals out, if there was danger out, it was outside her four glass doors. She felt stupidly safe inside, because it was light inside, and bad things happen in the shadows, not in the light.

the days of the gramophones

in the old days, the grammy phones were as beautiful as the young women who used them. they were shiny but rounded, painted and elegant with patterns of flowers and hearts and love, shaped cutely in compact blobby cubes. The colors! The colors were chosen every season by haute couture industrial designers--men and women in tuxedos and tophats and curly mustaches grown (or pencilled) in, who would step forward and crank the grammyphone's handle as the room of guests and afternoon by hostesses leaned forward in anticipation.

The young men of good families would give these treasures to the young women they pinned--presenting the gifts in feathery pastel boxes crammed twice sized with lavender, teal, and fuschia tissue paper. The young girls with bobbed curly hair squealed as was the proper show of affection and dedication, and then they would set out the machines on small stands in their foyers--every time a caller came, he or she would set his card respectfully in front of the machine. "I recognize that you are valuable enough to have won the love of so-and-so," these cards said between the lines. "And we are really so happy for you! Thank you for sharing this information with us."

In the young women's later years she would take out the player tenderly and be reminded of many things that were no longer so. The smells in the morning of her parent's house, the excitement she felt standing in front of the mirror waiting for men to come by and ask her to dance, the feel of gowns bulging out and pressing gently against the legs of a boy standing next to her. Playing the old dancing songs she'd be reminded of her youth, and she would turn and twist to an invisible partner, holding her old, withered hands out to the empty air.

All of the years inbetween that time and now evaporating, inconsequential. With them flew the weight of the screaming, the anguish, his brazen lovers appearing about town in broad daylight with him--and the pain of her marriage--and then the eventual indifference in their later years as they spent less time together. Her children all gone, confused and upset; the houses lost and burned, her parents dead and gone, the boulevards of her youth gone, everything now a confusing jumble of lewdness and without class. Even the colors of the dresses women wore were different; violent reds and yellows and black instead of the floating gowns and long gloves that had made her so beautiful to him.

sharks in the hudson

my three friends and I were walking along the river in the middle of the night in a way that's enough to make you a little queasy--but then you realize that it's OK, and it's so romantic how the park lamps glow at night, especially in balmy weather. We were walking in the darkness so that we could barely see the shape of each other's bodies; and only our voices drifting across to us, ghostly. I could smell the fresh smell of cut grass, the rotting of the dead plants along the water. I always forget how lush New York is; that most of the island was once like this thick green forest too.

we passed dark shadowy men night fishing in a suspended disbelief of the state of the river. i thought of what someone told me: that the Hudson River when you fish things out from the bottom drips soupy and black full of all sorts of menacing unnaturalness. and here it was so dark that you couldn't see anything, so maybe that's why they fished so late. Or maybe just because it was Friday night. They smoked and sang in Spanish and listened to little portable radios, smiling broadly at us and I could see their white flashing teeth.

We drifted down ten feet and then realized one of us was missing.

"Maybe he fell into the river and died, and now we have to drag him up from the bottom, how thoughtless," one of us suggested breathlessly.

"No, he's still here. He's a takes a licking and keeps on ticking type." I said.

"Hey, hey!" he ran after us shouting. We were all instantly ashamed of being annoyed at him for dying. "Someone caught a shark!"

He led us back to one of the fishermen's spots, where a small gray fish flailed in the grass. The men spoke to us in Spanish and reminded me abruptly of my father and my uncles, who all have a mania for fishing when they can do it. I remembered crabbing in San Fransisco and the big clattering rusty crab traps, and driving home with fish barely alive in white wet plastic buckets.

"Quite amazing, it's quite a small fish," my friend said.

We stared, entranced.

Then the fisherman debated whether or not to throw it into the water. Someone said, wouldn't it be cool to carry it home and put it in an aquarium? Right after that the man swooped down gracefully and sliced the shark's head off, red and glistening. The two girls were shocked and danced back nervously.

"Why are you so scared?" a boy chided. "That's where fish come from."

"It's just so...brutal."

"Eating is brutal."

The fishermen chatted a bit and then politely left us to go back to their work. I could smell the shark's blood, mixed in with the smell of salt and rotting things, and followed my friends home back into the blackness

married at 14

i remember there was this girl in my grade when I was 14 years old, and she was already married. She had a poise and confidence that was out of place in our school. It was too undistinguished a place for such a feat. Married! So young! And no creepy signs of abuse or weirdness--no bruises, no crying, no weird family history (actually we didn't know anything about her family history). just her, sitting in the bleachers kind of dreamy-eyed with her flyaway brown hair pinned back with barettes and her smart rolled up white jean jacket sleeves sitting her straight up into perfect posture.

She was glowing, radiant. yet not aloof. She'd talk excitedly with anyone who listened about her new husband, "Joe", who was about twelve years older and was a truck driver. She would pull you close to her, wrapping her fingers around your forearms so that you could see the shiny ring, and flutter, "Joe and me, we got a new couch!" or "Joe, he bought me flowers. It's so romantic!" She wore lip gloss and shone, literally, out her face, her bright white teeth flashing with joy.

She wasn't very pretty. She had squinty little eyes and a smattering of acne, but she was radiantly gorgeous in that space of time. Sitting on the bleachers and pulling her ring back and forth nervously. Everything was so new! Everything was so wonderful! Why hadn't anyone told her about all of life's little surprises waiting around the corner for her? We couldn't understand, but she didn't look to us in contempt, like other more experienced girls did. There were more waiting around the corner for us and like a wise older sister she wanted to tell us just how good it was going to be! Really!

and i think of her every time i see a new woman in love. that's how it is, how women in love like to talk to the rest of us. They have a present they can't wait to open and they want to share it all with us, the beauty of it. they bounce back and forth, swinging their hips, letting the pleasure of sex the night before push and jostle their good moods forward through the daytime.

"Oh God, man, I just didn't even know!" she'd say over and over again, shaking her head. "Nobody ever warned me. But since I didn't expect it, man, you think it feels twice as good!"

little old ladies know more

think of 2 squat little old ladies with still-black long hair that they wrap in twisted rolls on each side of their heads. they sit at a rickety old table, the table with a plastic tablecloth with browny gray and blue patterns of flowers and babies. The ladies hold onto the rickety table pounding, pounding on their dirty gray blue linoleum floor. They hold identical coffee mugs full of pitch nasty stuff gone cold, and they stir sugar from time to time to make the taste more bearable. Everything in the room is gray and blue shadows and gray and blue flowers past their prime.


"Color, life, all that. Red and pink and green. Those are garish shades I've closed a while ago. Now I act as fits my age," the sister to the left says.


The other sister, rocking the table back and forth, murmurs, "Our hopes are dimmer, but at least we scale back. See, it's you with the problems, always asking for more than you deserve, looking outward. That's why you're so fucked-up all the time. Us, we know our places, and we know not to wear ourselves out and we laugh at you, wearing yourselves thin."


They sit there chuckling and rocking with squinted eyes.

chalk friendships

i leave my mark, and walk away


you come ten minutes later day by day


every time I scrawl a heart


you leave behind twenty frowns

it's pretty strange


don't you think


how our eyes never meet


as we lay our chalk round and round



and infinitely repeat


our loves and sorrows a trembling mound


a neverending feat

come see my world


it's not too scary


or different from your own


come see inside my head


my dear


as i draw upon this stone

subway scene :: she couldn't take it

"She quit, she just couldn't take it."

"Why?"

"I dunno, she just couldn't take it. She quit cuz she didn't wanna do it. She just didn't wanna do it."

"Was she making enough money?"

"She wasn't making enough money. She just didn't wanna do it and she couldn't take it. She just didn't wanna do it. She just really didn't wanna do it."

"I guess she didn't wanna do it!"

"She couldn't take it. After three weeks... she had to borrow money to pay for the taxi. She wasn't making money! And... she didn't... she really didn't wanna do it!"

"I guess she just couldn't take it."

"You got that right."

The two guys were young and spiffed up, in nice baggy clothes. Their baseball caps were new, tilted just so. Shaved and washed. Prepared, even so late at night, not looking a little worn out like everyone else. Even though it was going-home time they had nice, smelling-good bodies and didn't even smell like smoke. Maybe the car going on the going home train was going somewhere for them, and they were travelling away from home as we were hurtling toward it.

The shorter one, shrugging jerkily at the end of every sentence, his palms turned out, as if satisfied as knowing "why she quit" but perplexed still with the answer.

"I just don't know. But I do. I'd do the same thing, but, you know how it goes."

"Yeah... what can you do?"

I tried to imagine what she was doing that was so horrible. For some reason I thought of all those weird jobs people have, like professional dog walker for wealthy people, although I guess it's not such a bad job. I always hear about wealthy people offering a room in their big posh upper east side pads in exchange for a permanent caretaker for Fifi the Poodle.

Or, as if to explain the inhumanity of all these Doberman Pincers and Great Danes being stuffed into tiny New York apartments, a defiant retort that these dogs were happier than dogs in the countryside, who often were abused and neglected despite all the grass and green around them. Don't give me that look, the Upper East Side with the mammoth Golden Retriever would snap. I've got a fucking professional taking care of Baby 24 hours a day. So she's happy in my apartment. She goes to the park, so it's not what it seems.

There'd be the girl, being dragged along by a gigantic arctic husky exploding out of the building's doorway (the doormen snottily stepping aside and noting how trashy she looked), as she ran jerkily behind it. On the park, her admirers (two boys in new Calvin Klein shorts and Tommy Hilfiger t-shirts) watching wistfully and kind of fumbling forward to help her. She'd decline, no, it's ok, not even noticing them. She was so miserable anyway... it was all she could think of, how she couldn't take it, damn the free room, and not notice how absorbed the two boys were, tagging along after her. One day she'd stomp her feet in humiliation in that park, in the rain, realizing she was late for the dog's training school appointment and flushed would ask to borrow money from one of the boys, to take the dog & taxi home. She'd slink out that night with a big bag, leaving behind most of her stuff, and never come back, too cowardly to tell Fifi's mommy what she had bravely screamed in the park a few hours before.

One of the boys shook his head knowingly. "Yes, she couldn't take it... but... damn! She had a nice ass."

friday night in the mta

subway stories

a cool, calm night and the car is crowded but full. Across from me there are two Shibuya Japanese girls with wrinkle-nest supertans and white eyeshadow, arms laden with classy shopping bags from pricey shops. Daddy's credit yen goes a long way in America. They are smiling, smiling happy and two boys in Fubu t-shirts are flirting hardcore with them without being gross and pushy, leaning back in their seats with arms rising up and down in the air. You're so cool, fool

Something a boy says perhaps sends one of the girls into a volley of giggles, stomping her feet up and down (she is wearing incredible high heeled hollow-soled sandals, contorting her small, ultra-tanned foot nakedly for us, on display), and the boys giggleshriek, jumping up and down and almost falling into the cuties' laps. The silliness spreads, slinkyesque, and a gigantic blue bottomed woman with incredible flopping curls shrieks, "Roach! Roach!"; almost throwing her baby stroller down the aisle to its death as she jumps in a corner trying to make herself as tight and unattackable as possible. A giant macho long haired gypsy boy pops up and hops up and down spinning on one foot beating the roach out of his hair; it flies! Its gauzy roach wings flapping as it bounces back and forth, dazed. Chaos ensues: the whole train is screaming and laughing and pounding its feet up and down on the floor like a pep rally.

"Oh my God!" a granny screams, tears rolling down her face.
"Oh my God!" the Fubu boys shriek. "Oh my God!" I yell for the sake of it, clapping my hands wildly on my thighs. "Oh my God!" we all scream at once, and we're all this close from standing up and dancing and singing and ripping our clothes off in this dreary little car hurtling into cement tombed oblivion.

One of the Shibuya girls arises, teetering, handicapped furthermore by the Prada shopping bag, runs surprisingly fast across the length of the car and stomps down hard, knee-rattling mean! ( the force travelling up her platform soles and through her knees and out of her brains in waves of invisible gas blue fire) She turns and faces us with a lopsided grin (we're too silly to realize yet we have just WON), stepping aside to reveal one very squashed, very juicy roach corpse spreadeagled beyond its limits beside a posed, tanned foot. She triumphantly struts back to her seat to our applause, and I could almost kiss her and sigh, "My hero..."

finder's fee

it's weird how in this neighborhood a street will abruptly thins out, and there are no boys sitting on the corner or women with little babies dancing and laughing, and suddenly it's just empty storefronts shuttered by big metal grates and only these aggressive lone men yelling, "Rock, rock, rock!" at you, getting louder and louder if they think you haven't heard. On my street there are always young men there flirting and smiling, but here all the young men look old, and they're leaning on abandoned ledges, twitching, and empty porches with scratches and irregular bruises on their shoulders. The people that live here hurry by quickly past these standing men, whom I suspect don't live here, whipping out keys and opening building doors so fast! amazingly fast! Even the old hobbly grannies with walking sticks.

And, ringing a buzzer several times, finally a women opens the door. She's a vague age (twentythirtyfortysomething; bad sunburn; too tan?); her face is unnervingly serene and too large for her head almost, framed by wild, frizzy sand colored hair. Her sleepy, narrow dark eyes are unblinking. Not warm, but not cold either. Just peaceful.

"Hello, welcome," she says in a singsong bird's voice. "I'm so glad you came..."
Such a strange accent! Can't put your finger on it. The kind of woman you would trust. Just look at her expression, so trustful! You'd expect to see her taking care of the old, the sick, the poor. With those huge, swinging motherly breasts and that giving, suffering face.

Her apartment number is written hastily with magic marker on the brown, ugly door. When she turns I notice the face tattooed on her shoulder. It's an angry face, a weeping angry purple face, with empty purple-rimmed flesh colored blanks for eyes. I can't help staring.

Her apartment is surprisingly homey. The kitchen is painted pink and has neat lists of addresses and phone numbers in meticulous ball point pen handwriting. The living room is plush, flower pinned to the wall. The women shows it off, waving her hand in slow motion. "Don't you want to sit on it? Take a look. Look at all of it." The purple eyeless howling face moves up and down with all the handwaving.

As my friend investigates the bathroom she turns suddenly to me. Her sleepy eyes are surprisingly sharp, turned on me. "And you? Are you looking too?"

"N-no. I'm just here."

"If he doesn't want it, maybe you might." She moves closer. Her face--always the same face! So large and childlike, even close up, her laugh lines vague and smoothed. She could be a child... but she isn't! She's a woman. A peaceful, peacekeeping woman. A woman you can trust. She holds up her hands by her eyes and pulls at the lobes in a sharp, jerky motion. Still smiling. The purple tattoo lost in the creases of her arms. "If he doesn't like it, maybe you would. If you would like it, I might."

My friend steps out of the bathroom. "Mmmm," he nods.

The woman pulls open one of the doors. It's one of those rooms. A bare dirty mattress on the floor, some crumbled incense, and a bare swinging light bulb. "This isn't the room I'm showing but it's one of the rooms here. It's smallish. The one I'm showing you is... biggish." She smiles, this time showing her teeth. They're small and pointed and shine viciously.

"And this is the one..." Down the hall. There are five people living here, but it's dark and quiet. Random doors are shut tightly, the cheap white paint so thick I wonder if I have to kick them open to get inside. She raps politely. "Erin? Erin? Eriiin......" Her bare shoulders are egg yellow lit by the hall light. I edge behind her, careful not to brush her cloud of hair. She turns the knob and pushes the door open, carefully watching our reactions.

"Oh..." we both exclaim.

Two bare mattresses on the floor, the same menacing swinging bulb, and surprisingly large windows with thief's grating across the low end. Thief's grating because it lets you open the window except no thief can crawl through it (my made up words), except for a midget thief, and then you're in trouble. We step hesitantly inside, ashamed at violating "Erin"'s privacy. We're not only assessing the room, we're measuring Erin's worth. Erin has no photographs, no pictures on the wall, just a pathetic melted candle on the linoleum floor and oddly, 12 pairs of dirty striped jock socks wadded in pairs on the bed. No sheets even on the mattress.

It's almost 10pm on a weekday night. Where is Erin? Where is everybody else in this apartment?

I wrap my fingers around the thief bars. The view looks out onto a courtyard below, like those Berlin hof buildings without the green center. Two potbellied men below are smoking, surrounded by rusty refrigerators, stoves, trash, and broken chairs. For some reason they are lit from the ground, as if there were a fire burning, a hearth to roast something (wires? tubes?). It's not a fire but caged bulbs on the ground, their cables threading into the darkness.

"I'd like a $200 finder's fee," the woman says. Not pushy at allt, just measuring up how desperate we are. "And the rent is only $440 a month. No smokers or drugs, we're all young professionals here."

One of the potbellied men looks up at us, squinting. He grins.

"This room comes furnished."

The man mouths her words perfectly. How can he hear? We're upstairs... too far away! He grins, teeth glinting something special.

"... it's very international here... we have someone from France, someone from England..."

As he mouths "France" to the woman's melodious voice he suddenly pinches his earlobes and pulls them down hard. He pulls them down, fists clenched, (letting go? he has to let go! pulling them down past his shoulders. down to his legs. His fingers pinched together pulling his flesh down to his toes. How can he? How can it go that far?)

"... I need a deposit. And two month's notice if you're leaving. Classified ads are very... expensive..."

The other man starts shrieking laughter, like a hyena (high pitched but not loud!!!), and hugs the incredible stretching earlobe man, and pulls him back into the darkness. They melt away, vanishing, and I could swear it's like there's smoke rising up from the whole square, smoke curling up and hinting shapes almost that form before evaporating into the night. The light, the electric light, blinks suddenly and flashes out and there's nothingness.

I let go of the grating, realizing how tightly I held on. My fingers are raw, maybe bleeding. Or just sweat?

"It's nice, but maybe not what I'm looking for," Friend says simply to the woman.

On cue, she spins and urges us out of the room. A hopeless case, she knows. Friend and I dreamily now skipping down the long hall. Everything in slow motion, it seems... And out the door. Outside of the apartment, we look in at the woman, who's closing her door. "Get home safe," she sings.

heat

you have these moments where you're just overwhelmed and all the heat just presses against your face too, too, too much. Standing on the station looking down below me, the signs luridly ugly, all the colors too bright and lines crumpling and bending sharply when they should be straight.

I leaned weakly on the rail overcome with emotion, and the man standing next to me edged a little too close, which made me even more paranoid that I'd burst out into a wrinkled baby face. But then the tears start welling up on the wrinkles and dips of your eyes, and you feel the first twisting in your chest, and no battle against it will win the war before finally, you're lost, and it's the torturous moments inbetween losing and hoping to win that you're standing there with all your might trying not to explode into sobs in public. The whimpers came quickly, not too loud, but bothersome. People moved away. There was no wind to quiet it. every bad memorie balled up into one inside you now, even those dark, dark, dark ones kept hidden so far away you can never talk about them except in rare instances, revenge of your mind against every rational effort at suppression. I don't care what's good or bad for me to think, I'm just gonna feel the way I feel!

it took me a few blinks to realize that I wasn't the one crying, to my shock. it was the man, sobbing, and he didn't strike me as someone who would do that sort of thing. he was old, tough, leathery, in a tank top and tough guy old school tattoos on his arm. my mind took another moment to register this. children cry. women cry. but not guys who look like my dad, guys who look like they can fix anything that moves or stays put. men like that don't do that kind of thing, and never in public, and if they do, it just throws all your cultural meters off whack, and you don't know whether to be empathetic or politely silent. this man was crying next to me, small shiny tears rolling down his cheeks, and it was very simple for me to imagine myself pressing my thumbs against his temples and pulling his adult mask off and seeing the very small, hurt boy underneath.

but why should children be the only ones who can feel?

and i turned away and thought again. no, adults can feel too, especially men like that. i looked away from him at the hazy buildings in the distance, so cloudy and pale, unreal next to this very, very real man. we were both embarrassed by each other, and remembering sharp, early memories that we thought we had put away. (can you really put away something from a time when everything was so uncontrollably vital and real? isn't that what being a grown-up is all about? reigning things in, slowing down, dulling the colors and straightening out the flowers so you don't go crazy and spin out of control?)

superfine burgers

you can eat good burgers at Superfine.

How do you get there? You take a swig of whisky out of your flask and close yours eyes and then count to ten. And then you're by city hall at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. You have to blink ten times to make sure the arches aren't shaped like Absolute bottles (damn you, Advertising! the cause of all society's problems and ills!) but pointed pasties on a buxom go go dancer's stretched out busums. weave your way across the crowds of effeminate European tourists, push your way past the full bottomed red haired girls on razor scooters, and of course dodge the bitchy barrelling people in bicycles that whip past you puffing because they have to pedal and blow big whistles all at once. the walk becomes wood and shakes with the passing traffic below. which you can see, through the cracks!


and when you turn around the hot steamy skyscrapers rising behind you without warning. no bicycle whistles this time. silhouetted in the sunset and bearing down. on everybody else. and before you know it, you're above the dirty river, and fleets of rich men sniffing cocaine in their yachts while their high heeled girlfriends dance deliriously on deck.

the giant neon WATCHTOWER in front, on fore. (Brooklyn!!!!!!!!!!) The Jehovah's Witnesses build huge castles with ominous signs. Inside they make their do Jesus or rot in hell pamphlets. They employ huge armies of short, long suffering immigrant women to assault you with their guilt. to explode their life frustrations on you in the form of hundreds of badly worded cheap paper pamphlets, to judge you with their exhausted, unfulfilled glares.

and they probably have wild, fierce granddaughters who dance on millionare yachts in high heels.

you make your way with the wind whipping your hair until you can't even so much as glance the other way because the sun is blinding, blinding out manhattan and erasing it from existence. skip faster and faster under the smelly underpass, leaving the ogling tourists behind to rush hurriedly back to the subway, afraid of being mugged.

through the withered grass and past the impossibly tall anorexic art society people with tattoos and big bank accounts, and bombed out urban landscapes purposely made to look that way. the graffiti here is beautiful but studied. the kind you see in thick coffee table japanese art books. looked at and take photographs with. frozen. with subtitles and artists' signatures like dead museum artifacts.

and there's superfine right there, the verandah plastic patio furniture underneath the thundering vibrating Manhattan Bridge. (how could such a massive structure get so uniformly dirty?) grinning wise lesbians with cowboy hats and diesel bikes that make gay men swoon and black eyeliner. serving the best dead cow burgers in the city. fresh herby delicious lip smacking ingredients. drinking along side gorgeous construction workers with billowing bellies and long cold bottle beer. and the red sided highway has daisies drawn on it in childrens chalk. the waitress' eyes are wise. no nonsense. all business. she's in a pink slip and cowboy boots and pink lipstick but she's still serious. as you wolf it down you sit back, sleepy eyed, sleepy sighed.

say goodbye

i want to play

dorf

i am badass

you can make a picture in your head: think of a dirty plastic bag let loose from the roof of the Empire State Building and miraculously wending its way up and down the currents of polluted hot air that grace this fair city, slowly, eventually, finally, totally descending to the earth-ly realm.

i drift down, crackling plastic bag body rattling, past the condos and nervous fat free bony women in ann taylor separates that hang loosely around their gaunt waists, pacing around desks piled high with thick smelly perfumed copies of Vogue and maybe Mirabella, to cover up the divorce papers. over loud loud crowded streets full of gypsy cabs that vibrate meringue bass back and forth like a pinball machine and young peachish girls in tube tops sucking lollipops. pirouhetting my plastic handles and not quite but almost touching the catholic high school playgrounds on rooftops surrounded by supertall fences that are badly disguised suicide dares.

all is slow and grace and effortless until the abrupt and shocking stop! my plastic bag legs caught in the branches of a scrawny tree. and i see the hundreds of other plastic bags snared by trees around me. that's why they plant trees in this part of town: to harvest the fruits of the earth here. like salmon eggs. plastic bag caviar.

in the evenings some unnamed trucks go by and pick them quickly but efficiently, staffed by short, round men in orange overalls and lime green ski masks. they have these long sticks with rubber hands on the ends that grab the bags with a ducky sound that reminds me of my sweaty legs lifting off a vinyl car seat on a humid day. and then the bags are quickly inhaled into the darkness behind the van door, and if they scream you can't hear it, and who knows what they do?

i drifted down by the river (laughing at the imprisoned bags that shrieked for release), and found someone's abandoned pink and blue hopscoth game. it got a little out of control and the insides of the squares spilled out and exploded, chalk-esque, into smeary bursts of color and life along the walkway.

i rubbed the lines indistinct, except for, in baby blue cursive chalky handwriting:

which i spared...
(since i am!)

a girl & a boy on a hill

explosion of color and light

an explosion of color and light.

my babies

hello, i have a story. i have a story. we sat knock kneed outside the limelight in knee highs with runs and ragged polyester skirts scissored just below the knees and deliberate greasy sloppy hairstyles collapsing under a mess of bobby pins. the street was dirty and the air was dirty, but so was the trash. but we crouched low on the ground kneading our knuckles into the sidewalk because that was what was to do.

I was on my bed last night thinking about the nature of girlhood, and how it's stretched so far into my twenties by now that I'm wondering if it'll every stop. I'm getting older now, so it's caught up, and girlhood will push me over by the end of the race and run ahead. Then I can never escape it. I'll get swallowed up and crawl back into the womb of a 6 foot slant cheeked full hipped blonde woman, inhaled into nothingness.

i remember cloudy dance floors and boys that would say yes. red armed scrawny boys with dirty rubber bands round their wrists.

i was on broadway and saw a group of laughing teenage girls who must have been almost 10 years younger than me, and i couldn't see the beauty in them. they were gangly and plaque toothed and looked horrible, like how we threw barbie dolls in the bar b q coals to see them stretched out and distorted. their girlhood hasn't caught up with them yet, they're women first, hi town shoes, red lipstick and silky underwear. and then later on if they're lucky they'll become girls again.