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Izah watched from the underbrush as a malnourished white girl posed with a spear. She wondered if CosmoGirl was going to make spears a trend, if girls from England were going to buy pink-feathered spears like that one from the "strip mall." The model jutted her hip as Izah spat on the ground, turning her back on the ridiculous scene.
He used a stencil to airbrush the dragon onto Cassie's thigh. Its tail make a rude curl toward her labia. The paint was lime-green, trashy, and she wished it was permanent.
We locked her in the freezer when she told us the truth. At first she said only "No please, I do not know nothing of about a dead bird" in her misshapen Portuguese. But we took and took, and she didn't mind the cold.
Everything your greedy eyes pilfer becomes yours and yours alone. This cloud, shaped like an elephant; this stick-figure woman; this shoe hanging from a telephone wire, that baby's five-toothed simper. All yours, because YOU have seen them. Because they are YOUR discoveries, bagged and claimed.
The roof was slick with rain, but Johnny lifted me without a second thought. I waited for us to bowl over, to scream under the white-hot almost moon, but his feet never slipped.
I was tired of being embraced like a child about to cry. No one looked me in the eyes anymore; I was starved for touch, for fingers in my hair and hands on my back.
I was tired of being embraced like a child about to cry. No one looked me in the eyes anymore; I was starved for touch, for fingers in my hair and hands on my back. Not the faux-mother hugs that punctured me like a stuffed animal worn from adoration.
Peter had been watching this montage for weeks. An adolescent girl would wander across the baseball diamond, barefoot, carrying a pair of flats in one hand.
"I worry about her," he said aloud, as the girl chose her favourite blue swing.
His wife had stopped answering. That year would pass in myriad and impatience, measured in tiny squares from his wife's Diana Ross calendar. She would keep x-ing, the girl would keep swinging, and Peter would keep watching. It was a cycle he sometimes pretended to hate.
The phone booth had cracked Plexiglass and ads for a missing girl, another plain-Jane face I didn't recognize. Norah Goldwyn, age 12, brown eyes. I dug two quarters out of my back pocket and chanted his work number, like a mantra, to myself.
Vaughn’s was a flea market where employees bummed cigarettes on their lunch break. Even down the road, standing in a phone booth with cracked Plexiglass, I could hear them perfectly.
“I know you have smokes,” the woman insisted. “I gave you a Camel Light yesterday. Don’t be such a penny pincher.”
The penny pincher laughed.
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writing since 2010 · 24 entries · 19 days shown up
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