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!"