From a Great Enough Distance

plenty thirsty we were:
balustrades

come midday splayed
the whitest sheet I have known
white

the grass as bridge
to light

storefront lowing
windows as mirrors

plenty reflected we were

copies
I have known us
copied

black and white and
over and over
the counter let's pretend
these aren't
hard:

skins
as costumes not
protection

plenty sunned
we were leathered
bottle people popping
soap bubbles
perfect child air

I have known

rows
now color poplars
all the different peppers
24th and Potrero I have
known white

and walls
and walls

do you know them
by name do you know
me by number

plenty numbered we were
seldom shedding our
animal skins resigned
all plenty
city kids

come daylight
we were giving us seldom
saying you are welcome here

this Rimbaud-axis rhapsody
plenty slender and quick-
growing trees with triangular leaves

flowers in catkins

fine-ribbed fabric
plenty ribbed we were

the part of the leg
behind the knee joint
popping

every little soap bubble
every steal beam
every bone
little every valve
I have known
the white and break
every little wave

a timber beam
supports we were
dear and irregular

tumbling like
water when it
boils

like a film reel of
water when it boils
over and
over the counter
culture let's
pretend

these aren't hard

1.

.you – a cold shoulder sweat and the click of
counted bones saw in their joints seldom
oiled.  i – waited on trains transcend on
planes and sane sang and discharged.
knew gurney and grip iv drip and
perforate dirty bubbles in perfect
child air.  they – popping in the
sOn. grass as bridge to light. 
bottlepeople breaking like
you – i would break  over
any needle of a thigh. 
any haystack
any little
word.

2.
plenty
thirsty we were
the prick of a finger just you –
straw into cold.  the palm at the arm
of the last lapse rises.  will the tongue
in the throat of the last rise lapse. the spokes
of your ribCage. the fact plenty thirsty we were.

3.
select cut prime
symmetrical laid on
butchers block opt
for the knife

4.
we are progressing.  a
myth of moral superiority
in past centuries.  really fear of
forward    motion        resulting            in
an end.  we have accepted end . .    .                       .
we are progressing (towards it.)

E is playing the ukulele.  We are filled with veins like threads and cords.  She has cut off most of her hair, and I imagine her in her apartment, which I’ve never been to, pressing her left palm to the mirror for balance.  She is pretty in a private sort of way.  The skin that separates us, she sings, has scars and sores.  Her set ends.  We all sit outside Brainwash drinking beer out of plastic cups and gin out of my blue metal thermos, sharing french fries and cigarettes.  J and R have only been in California for two days and they keep saying California, California, California, holy fuck.  We are trying not to talk about the night before, but all three of us are famous for our big mouths.  My favorite part about a spontaneous threesome is the moment that you realize that, yes, this is happening.  Yes, it happened, and it wasn’t safe, and it wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t the second time, and I woke up on a floor covered in cold toast and two hundred bottles, one hundred of them broken, and sweaty clothing in piles.  At some point, I became a body.  At some point, sex was more like dancing and dancing was more like sex and I stopped counting on toes and nailbeds, maybe at a day past nineteen.  We are dancing to E and her ukulele and screaming CALIFORNIA and our throats are scratchy and we’re dirty and we’re broke and we’re in our twenties now.  We tell E that she’s beautiful and M grabs my hand.  I met him at Dolores Park earlier.  I kissed him back out of boredom, or because he reminded me of someone, or because it was sunny and my skin was pink and I’d already had five beers.  He is sitting next to me and he doesn’t smoke cigarettes.  We leave Brainwash and go to his place in the Mission with thirty-foot-high ceilings.  There are balloons everywhere, and we don’t question them.  J and R and I kick them into the air.  And we won’t worry about popping them because they aren’t ours.  And we won’t worry about our drinking, not tonight, and we’ll pretend that these were never hard.  The drugs.  If Elliot Smith did them, they must be okay, and I’ll plan on stabbing myself in the heart someday, too.  Just to prove that I’m a rock star.  And we won’t worry about the dishes piled, the dirty laundry stuffed behind the sofa, the PG&E bills we should have paid two months ago and whether or not we’ll have to unmake the bed by candlelight.  I believe in God, but I don’t advertise that.  I cut myself some new wave bangs in D’s bathroom and, the next morning, I have a panic attack in a high-end Chinese restaurant downtown.  I walk J and R to the BART station and kiss them both on the lips, real kisses, wet.  They’ll be in Seattle in three hours.  I’m jealous.  Put me on a plane to anywhere.  D and I go to the park and miss M by a couple minutes, which I don’t mind because I’ve taken too much Xanax to be interesting.  Everyone is here, again, W from my painting class last year who had a girlfriend and probably still does.  D’s friends, those ones, they make the use of pronouns complicated.  I’m a simple girl, really; I just want things to happen quickly.  I am white and rich and lazy.  I refuse to be bored.  And I can move back and forth and back and forth and it won’t change anything.  I know that now.  We nap on a white blanket and it is burning in the sun, the skin that separates us.  How it has scars and sores.  And we are filled with veins, like threads and cords and threads and cords.

This is how we prayed.
Among spent cigarettes and empty
bottles of store-brand soft drinks

confused in the larkspur grown for levity.
The children grown in neighboring houses ground
our wavering voices into new snow.

Grant me our
jackets missing buttons.
Our white wilted hands

have grown together
into strange-knuckled
knots.

We have ribcages, designed
to protect the simple machines
that could have been hearts.

Grant us
my seventh-night winters.
We might have looked softer

under violent light neons as
advertisements for living.  They grew
larkspur: levity.  

It was eating at our ankles.
We had sharp angels, snow angels.
This is how we prayed.

Answered with a slight drop in the temperature.  
We didn’t mind the winter much.  
In fact,

I might like it best.
Something about white powder and
seeing my own breath.

He found Jill’s number on the back of a business card that read, simply, “ghosts.”  The business card was wedged between the old-fashioned ketchup and mustard bottles on the table of the diner near the bay, where he ordered grapefruit juice, a Denver omelet, and white toast.  The waitress also brought him coffee, which he hadn’t ordered.  She was round and young, with a brown ponytail and a cough.  Her name, according to the laminated badge pinned to her black tee shirt, near her collar bone, was Jen.  She fiddled with an amber ring on her thumb and apologized profusely for the coffee.  It was on her, she said.  He didn’t drink coffee, he told her.  No, not even doctored up with cream and sugar.
    “Do you believe in ghosts, Jen?” he asked her.
    She shrugged.
    “Belief in them has been incredibly persistent for thousands of years,” he said.  “They’ve been photographed.”
    “I think I read about that,” Jen said, resting a palm on the edge of the table and shifting her weight to one hip.  “It has something to do with the way light ripples in glass.”
    “So you don’t believe in ghosts?”
    “I like ghost stories.”
    “Will you tell me one?”
    The cook palmed a metal bell.  The eggs were up.
    “Maybe later,” Jen said.  “I’m not sure if I remember any off the top of my head.”
    “I’m Adam,” he said, and held out a hand.  She tucked her hair behind her ears and took away the cup of coffee that he hadn’t ordered.

    Full from his omelet, Adam wrapped his toast in a paper napkin and pocketed it.  He wiggled his fingers at Jen and walked to the pier.  It was windy and an unaccompanied Mexican toddler flew a kite shaped like a target from the end of a dock.  There were makeshift apple stands and jewelry venders lining the next dock, and Adam watched the old women as they counted granny smiths into paper sacks and shoved one-dollar bills into their aprons.  He wondered if there was a payphone nearby and fingered the business card in his pocket.  It was buttery and he worried the number on the back, which was written in thick blue ink, would smear.  He took the card in front of his face and blew on it.  He made a wish.
    
    Adam lived in a studio apartment downtown.  It was above a Chinese restaurant, which he had never eaten at.  He was the only person he knew with a landline.  It was late, but he called anyway. 
    A woman’s voice answered.  She sounded tired, like she was always tired.  He was immediately interested.
    “The first thing you need to know,” she said.  “Is to never go on a ghost hunt alone.”
    “I’m not sure I’d have anyone to take with me.”
    “Where is your ghost?”
    “I’m not sure,” he said.
    “Who is she?” she asked.
    “How do you know if it’s a she?” he asked.
    “Isn’t it?” she asked.
    “What’s your name?” he asked.
    “Jill,” she said, after a long pause.  “Do you want me to come over?”
    “I live downtown,” he said.  “Across the street from the library.”
    “What time is it?” she asked.
    “Almost one,” he said.  “I’ll reimburse you for a cab.”
    “I’ll walk,” she said.

    While he waited for the ghost hunter to arrive, he poured himself a glass of whiskey and studied his reflection in the dark window as he drank.  She arrived only minutes after he hung up his phone, and she caught him mussing up his hair and tracing the circles under his eyes with his fingers.  She smiled.  She was a little blonde in a red dress and heels, and it was raining.  Everything about her seemed forced.  He felt sorry for every woman he’d ever known.  She looked cold.  He opened the window and tossed her down a key.  It landed in front of her and she struggled to bend over.  Her dress was too tight.
    “I’m 303,” he yell-whispered.  He opened the door and she was there in seconds, out of breath and a little chubby with raw-looking lips and a bottle of whiskey, the brand he always bought from the corner market on his way home from work on weekdays.  She shook it in front of his face and smiled.  She was younger than he’d imagined.
    “How old are you?” he asked.
    “Eighteen,” she said.  “How old are you?”
    “Older,” he said, and sighed audibly, which she laughed at.
    “Do you really believe in ghosts?” she asked.
    “I want to,” he said.
    “Good enough,” she said, and screwed the lid from the bottle, inviting herself into his kitchen and standing on her toes to reach the glasses on the top shelf of the open cabinet.
    “Do you?” he asked, as they worked on their first drinks and sat down on opposite ends of the floor.
    “Do I what?”
    “Believe in ghosts.”
    “I believe in life force,” she said.  She looked up from her drink and massaged her temple and hugged her knees into her chest.
    “Do you have many friends?” he asked.
    “A few,” she said.  “A few good ones.”
    “Do you like music?” he asked.
    “Everyone likes music.”
    He finished his glass in a single, violent swig and watched the walls for tricks of light.
    “I went onstage at a magic show once,” she said.  “I was the girl they saw in half.”
    “What did they do?” he asked.  “I mean, really?”
    “The magician sawed me in half.  And then people clapped and he put me back together.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    “That’s fine,” she said.  “I can live with that.”
    “Are you really eighteen?” he asked.
    “Yes,” she said.  “As of Cinco de Mayo.”
    “Did you have a party?”
    “Sort of,” she said.  “How old are you?”
    “Twenty-five,” he said.  “But I feel older.”
    “Everyone says that,” she said.  “But I think you’re right.”
    “You seem younger than eighteen,” he said.
    “Don’t worry.”
    At this point they had both inched forward across the carpet and were less than a foot away from each other.  He swept her hair out of her eyes.
    “Want to go ghost hunting?” he whispered.
    “Later,” she said, and reached for his mouth with hers like she was taking a bite out of an apple.
    She bent forward too far and the zipper on the back of her dress broke.  She struggled out of it and balled it up and threw it into a corner.  He grabbed her by the waist and she shook violently.
    “What was that?” he asked, pulling her closer.
    “Life force,” she said.  She pulled his shirt over his head and, through the cotton, he asked her again if she believed in ghosts.
    “Yes,” she said.  “Yes.”

    He woke on the floor of his apartment with a headache.  It smelled like sex and Chinese food and it was Sunday.  Jill was still sleeping, her round thighs anchoring his knees to the ground.  She reminded him of a character from a picture book he’d been read as a child, but he couldn’t remember which one.  He was hungry and he thought of the waitress at the diner where he’d found Jill’s number, Jen.  Jen with the amber ring and the ghost stories, maybe from summer camp, the ones that she couldn’t remember.  He couldn’t remember what color her eyes had been.  Jill’s were probably blue, he thought, but they were closed.  He had the urge to wake her just to see what color her eyes were, but she was smiling.  He didn’t really have dreams anymore.  He gently lifted her legs and placed them on the carpet.  The blinds were all open, and it was bright.  There was an enormous evergreen outside of his biggest window and, as it moved with the world, the light on the back wall of the apartment shifted.  Ghosts, maybe, or life force. 
    Adam liked reading the New York Times on Sundays, taking his time and eating cereal straight out of the box.  He wished that Jill would leave.  He wished he had the courage to wake her.  He wondered if he should pay her.  He’d found her name on a business card.  He hated the smell of Chinese food and she wore too much perfume and he didn’t believe in ghosts.  He’d been raised in a strict Christian household, and ghost stories weren’t allowed at Christian summer camp.  He had been read to from watered-down versions of the Bible instead.  Versions in which Job got everything back 40 fold and there was no gritty violence, no contradictions, no sex.
    He found his pants, put them on, and removed the business card from his pocket, where he’d returned it to after dialing the number on the back.  He threw it in the trashcan and poured some dish soap over it.
    And he left the ghost hunter asleep on the floor of his studio apartment and grabbed his paper from the stoop and headed towards the diner to read the paper and ask Jen about her ghost stories again.  Maybe she’d remembered one by now.  Maybe it would be just enough to frighten him a little, to catch him off guard and make him believe.

    He sat at the same table, the one with the window that faced that bay.  Everyone jumps from the Golden Gate, he thought, but I’d go from the Bay Bridge.  He imagined gulping water and forgetting which way was up half way between Oakland and San Francisco.  He wondered if they fished the bodies out or if they were still there, somewhere, miles below the whites and reds of head and tail lights, their ankles tangled, bottom-feeders circling their chests.
    He ordered before Jen had a chance to put the menu on his table.  Two eggs, over easy.  White toast and coffee.
    “You don’t drink coffee,” she said.  She wore a white tee shirt today, and her hair was down.  There was a piece of fluff caught in her bangs and her name badge was upside down.
    “I was up late,” he said.
    She penned his order on a pad of yellow paper, bored.
    “Aren’t you going to ask me why?” he asked.
    “No,” she said.
    “I went ghost hunting.”
    She disappeared into the kitchen and he separated the ketchup and mustard bottles.  There was nothing in between.  Jen was back with the coffee and the fluff removed from her hair.
    “Do you still want to hear a ghost story?” she asked.
He poured too much sugar into his coffee and stirred it with a fork.  He raised his eyebrows.
“I get off at three,” she said.  “Come by.”

After Adam finished his omelet and most of the paper, he wandered the pier.  It was cold, and the women with their apples had taken the day off.  The docks were empty, and Adam realized that he had never seen a single boat anchored at the pier.  He wondered if Jill was still asleep.  He hoped she’d woken up and put her ruined red dress back on and walked, in the cold, to wherever it was that she had come from.  He hoped that she was waiting by her phone, ready to spring from her couch and bolt out the door in a too-tight dress and high heels if someone called with a ghost problem.  He hoped her next caller believed in ghosts.  He hoped that her next caller was a woman, an ugly old woman with a bad perm who believed that her husband’s spirit (life force?) broke the dishes stored in the attic and whispered in her ear while she was trying to fall asleep.  Jill deserved someone like that, someone who believed in something, spirits and keeping the unused in the attic and love that didn’t stop, ever, not even years after the object of the love in question passed.

(to) (be) (continued)

I have taken to walking
the Pike-Pine corridor,
divergent come lunch hour
in a suit that I’ll grow in to.

I have taken
to our necessary memories.
I cuff my pants still,
but have quit smoking and lost:
the right to loiter in front of buildings,
the record store that used to be a bookstore,
the bookstore that used to be a hotel in the eighties.

predestinate.

all excess and mess.
messy, we were. later silence
and it’s breaking cross thigh
when it was needle and you were
pounding
pragmatics,
language not yet skipping.

knotted rope and skyscape
at eighteen floors where
you were a woman,
measurable pound
by pound, pocket
to pocket,

  an angel in white
-you took off your dress

=then you were just an angel.

I have taken to cataloguing
this subsurface subtraction
in little brown books.

one is labeled skin.

if you don’t, someone else
will: movie conversation.
something scripted.
clumsy expressions of love.

all your body.  you were
blooded and bursting.  we were
bloodline and brick building,
eighteen floors up:
the penthouse blueing and absent,
our dirty little veins.

come lunch hour I am
loosening my tie,
swallowing my teeth.
timecard,
punching,
wall,
wasting,
time:
absentminded spinning
of a prayer wheel, the
hollow, internet pornography.

you and the taking to,
dancing circles around your body
and its history.  taken.
tailbone known to miss
the stop button by a great enough distance.

the elevator,
the party,
the comedown,
the raid:
our necessary memories.

the night the news crew knocked the door down.
how we knew our mess was fashionable.
we had plenty money
and little else.

just angels come northbound,
stupid and smiling.

blue blood, how you blamed
our veins.  promised to still want
me, necessarily.

body is basically anecdotal.  I have no
firsthand knowledge of bone, of sinew,
of muscle tissue, and synapses don’t fire,
I’m guessing as interstate flares
or cannons as I imagine them.

the pull of skin produces few
or no echoes and I have no
experience with anemography
and I can’t say with any certainty
whatnot of windburn at any-measured-speed.

breath is basically anesthetic.
don’t believe me?  try blowing hot on
your lover’s back with
ears cupped like hands lowing
the ocean.  this salted

body is my angle of attack,
though splayed inanimate.
anima, gripping anklebone,
body, basically narrative.  Just
an account of rock fall, a talus.

    We met at a bookstore that we had taken to calling Spine and Throat.  The tin sign above the shop (which rang like a gong in high winds) read Spine and Crown, but we liked our name better.  Spine (the strange marrow bridges we bent to pick up pennies on the sidewalk and to unzip the other’s pants) and Throat (the underground tunnels that burnt when we drew deep breaths of fresh coffee or had one of our play-yelling matches in an empty parking garage).
    We met at the bookstore and immediately climbed the narrow staircase to the second story, which was always empty.  The unfailing quiet of the bookstore was important.  What needed to be done needed to be done, and without any interruptions.  We didn’t believe in fate, really, in the truth of sermons delivered by seers or in magic eight balls or in divine intervention.  But we were sick of making our own decisions, frustrated with our free will.  I drew a coin from my pocket and we studied each other for a moment, neither of us drawing breath, fearing – something.  Anything.  Either way.  Heads or tails, upstairs at Spine and Throat.
    I was wearing a yellow dress and white shoes three sizes too small.  Fake pearls and a real leather clutch (a yellow that didn’t quite match my dress.)  My hair was white-blonde then, and I yanked a strand of it out to roll between my thumb and forefinger.  I was pretty then, pretty in a painstaking and fragile sort of way, the kind of pretty that falls over, like a Jenga tower, if any little detail is removed.  And Joe was ugly then, and still is.  His clothes stuck to his body awkwardly, like plastic covering couches in a nervous old woman’s living room.  Something was off in the composition of his muscles; his bones didn’t seem to fit together right.  His hair was longer on one side.  He was Frankenstein, the pieces of twenty different men sewn and bolted together.  And, together, we made sense, in an odd way.  We were some age-old archetypal duo, some gentle sort of beauty and some shaking sort of beast.
    He took the coin and studied it, testing its weight in his palm and checking the year of its mint (1987, the year our mothers spit us out).
    “Best out of three?”
    I shook my head.  If we were doing this, we were doing it right.  One flip, heads or tails.  A manic-depressive Abraham Lincoln’s profile (IN GOD WE TRUST) and all of Los Angeles or a building I couldn’t remember the name of (E PLURIBUS UNUM) and the end of this entire mess.  One flip, heads or tails, white letters like the crest of a giant wave on the hills overlooking the canyons somewhere in Southern California or the sawing-in-half of the rope we’d been playing tug-of-war with for the past four months.
    “I’ll do it,” I said, taking the coin back and positioning it on my right thumbnail, squeezing my hand into the tightest little fist I could without snapping my finger bones.  
    And then, just as my thumb began to flex and that familiar anxious ringing in my ears began to sound, I spotted a nightmare of a red sedan, shifting into park across the street from the bookstore.  Joe had seen the car many times before, every day for the twelve darkest months of his life.  I had never seen it, only heard his trance-like descriptions of its pulling up to his old high school or waiting two blocks away from his parents’ home.  But I knew it when I saw it, knew that is was that car, the car, before I even saw Joe’s face go eggshell white and his strange, stitched-together sort of body, collapse into a shelf of military biographies.  
    I joined him on the floor and, keeping quiet and low to the ground, we waited, my arm splayed over the shuddering breadth of his back, the coin cold in my grip. And I whispered the name Gailen, maybe to myself.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    I let him stay the night at my place.  The red sedan didn’t drive away, down Pike Street and into some grotesque horizon, until five minutes before the owner of Spine and Throat, a bored-looking man with a red beard, called up to us (better get going kids –kids?) and flipped the paper sign on the door.  We had spent more than three silent hours on the floor of the bookstore.  We were sore and nervous and my apartment was only blocks away and his was a thirty-minute walk or ten minutes by bus and it was dark (winter, still) and I couldn’t leave him alone after what had happened.
    So we put my radio on to the oldies station to calm ourselves down.  Joe sat on the counter and I boiled water for pasta and banged the lid of the can of spaghetti sauce against the table a couple of times to loosen it up.  After dinner, I brought out some old photo albums, told the stories that went along with my old school portraits and the names of my grandfathers and uncles.  He stared at his knees, which were still twitching.
    “It’s almost three in the morning,” he said, his first utterance since the red sedan. “You must be tired.”
    I was tired, exhausted to the point of near-drunkenness, but I shook my head.  I was glad to hear him speak (the radio station seemed to play the same ten songs in a rotation and talking to myself was beginning to drain the remaining life out of me), but this was the exact conversation that I’d been hoping we could avoid.  I’d imagined us growing so weary that we fell asleep on couches or carpets in separate rooms.
    “I need to sleep,” he said.  We stared each other down, waiting.
    My dress was covered in dust from the floor of Spine and Throat and there were large patches of sweat soaking through his tee shirt.  He looked younger, suddenly, less of an ill-formed man and more of a half-formed child.  I wanted to swallow him up in some white puff.  I remembered the coin flip that had been planned.  The coin that had never been flipped.
    “I forgot it in the store,” I said.  I got up and started the water running.  I slipped my hands into orange rubber gloves and reached for the sponge.  I began to scrub our dinner dishes.
    “The coin,” he said.  He dug his fingers into his cheeks, his voice rising to a near-scream to be heard over the running water and scouring of the pans.  “This isn’t about that, Lis.  And really, after everything, can’t we just forget about it?”
    I turned the water off.
    “Where do you want to sleep, then?”  I propped myself up onto the counter without breaking eye contact.  I did what Nana Josephine taught me, did what pretty girls do when they want something and decide, rather than hope (a sentimental sort of word, best suited to a needle-pointed throw pillow in some Midwestern home) that they will get it.  I narrowed my eyes and cocked a shoulder forward and tucked my bone-blonde hair behind my ears.
    “With you,” he said.  “Of course with you.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    For the next while, he stayed at my apartment.  I didn’t worry aloud about his cat (probably starved to death) or mention the fact that I’d been paying for groceries.  We developed a comfortable routine.  The radio was always on at low volume, the dial always set to the oldies station.  We joked, sometimes, that we were the only people in the city under fifty who listened to it.  
We woke, with headaches and sore backs, together, and I made coffee.  I left for work with Joe sitting on the end of my bed, staring out the window, watching the road, waiting for something.  I returned to find him in exactly the same position.  The first hand I laid on him after being away from the apartment was met with a shudder, a wince, and, finally, reciprocal touch.  We planned a move to Los Angeles that would never happen.  We went to bed early, flirting as if it were a one-night stand.  As our bodies began to separate, he shook.  The whole bed and whole room shook with horrible, violent electricity.  And I went outside and sat on the stoop of my apartment building and stayed there for a while with my head between my knees and, when I returned to the bedroom, he was asleep.  And he mumbled something about Gailen between breaths and I turned over and, the next morning, with our heads pounding and the sinew of our backs tangled, we woke.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    It was Wednesday, maybe, and I was late for work.  Joe was struggling to zip up the back of my dress, his hands shaking.  I was watching us in the full-length mirror on the closet door.  His eyes bulged as if he were choking.
    “You were in my dream,” he said, leaving my dress half-zipped and turning me, by my shoulders, to face him.  He looked at me, almost tenderly, then moved his gaze to the ceiling tiles.  Counting them, counting minutes.  I threw an arm over my shoulder and tried to pull my zipper its final three inches.  It was stuck and there was near-silence, only the low whistle of the radio in the next room over.  Wouldn’t it Be Nice?
    “I was running through a desert,” he said.  “I wasn’t sure what I was running from.  Not at first.”
    Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older and we didn’t have to wait so long? from the other room.
    “And then,” he said, so softly that I almost had to read his lips, “giant female fingers shot up from the soil.  Like in the sandworms in the movie Beetlejuice.  They dove at me from all directions.  They had these giant red nails, sharpened to points.”
    I looked down at my hands and, my dress still half unzipped, left for work.  I closed the door to my apartment as softly as I could and whispered, to myself and whichever dark corners of the hallway were ghosted enough to listen, I am not Gailen.  And I only half-believed it.
    Outside, above a telephone poll plastered with band posters and advertisements for living, were two hummingbirds in near-collision.  I wondered which was to blame.

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    I worked at a florist near Spine and Throat then, a job I’d foolishly taken, ignoring its low pay and the inevitability of mindless labor, because I was that sort of girl at the time.  I had, upon applying for the position, imagined adopting a Cockney accent and bursting into song or, at the very least, arranging bouquets (I fancied myself something of an artist then) and selling them to handsome businessmen on their way to upscale restaurants downtown, where women in yellow dress and blonde curls sat in wait at mahogany tables from Italy.  There were, of course, no sudden resounding major chords and most of my customers were stocky housewives with square jaws.  I took their money and counted their change, but was not granted the privilege of arranging the flowers, even after working at the shop for almost a year.  I rid myself of my rule of keeping a vase of fresh flowers in every room of my apartment and was almost relieved that Joe wasn’t the sort to buy flowers for birthday or Valentine’s gifts.  He wasn’t the sort to buy gifts at all, really.  He hated birthdays and most holidays.  He was like a widower whose deceased spouse was invisible and died almost every day of every single year.  Every day, ever since Gailen had hunted him down like a limping deer, Joe was in mourning.
    I handed a woman one-dozen white spray roses, two nickels, and a dime.  She was older than most of the women who came by the shop, at least eighty and not wearing her years well.  Large sunglasses with thumbprints on their lenses rested atop her shock of white hair.  She wore a yellow coat and a frown and gestured vaguely, scaling my face and body with little eyes like lasers, as she left.  I imagined her returning to her apartment, a sparsely furnished one-bedroom with a low ceiling and houseplants that she used as ashtrays but watered religiously.  I pictured her removing her only vase from a high shelf in her kitchen (she’d have to stand on a stool or chair to reach), filling the vase (it would be some simple, clean, ceramic thing, painted robin’s-egg blue or mauve) with lukewarm water, and spending a full hour arranging the flowers.  What else would she do to pass the time?  At the end of the hour, they’d still be off, unbalanced, maybe, or slightly uneven in length, even after she’d cut them neatly with her miniature gardening shears.  And she would be too tired and bored and old to feel more than the mildest frustration, and she’d lay the vase to rest atop the television (with its dusty screen and three channels and lost remote) and it would be time for her supper.  And she lived alone (her husband must have died; it is a fact that women take longer to pass) so she’d sear a single chicken breast in cheap, supermarket-brand olive oil and cut it politely, with her knife in her right hand and her fork in her left, just as her mother had taught her seventy years before.  And she’d watch the news and get into bed alone, wearing an eye mask and only after swallowing the eight different white pills that her doctor prescribed for her generic sorts of ailments.  Only after wondering why she bothered taking them at all.  And only after wishing that she had the energy to scream.

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    I bought a loaf of bread and romaine lettuce and a rotisserie chicken on my way back to my apartment.  Pike Street was quieter than usual, and it was colder than it ever gets in the city, even in winter.  I lived in an old building, then, constructed eighty or more years before I was even born, and the insulation was poor.  The walls were thin.  It was cold inside, colder than it was in the streets.  I took my coat off anyway, studying my arms and then face and hair in the reflective row of mailboxes inside of my apartment building.  I liked the way I looked, then, or liked the way I looked in an imagined retrospect.  I knew I’d see pictures of myself in thirty years and compliment my former self aloud, as if referring to another person altogether.  What a pretty young woman!
    I set my purse and coat on the counter in the kitchen, began to rummage through the cupboard next to the refrigerator for a big bowl for a salad.  It was quiet.  The radio, I noticed, was unplugged.  The low, comfortable whistle of songs written before my birth and performed by the aging or the aged or the no-longer-among-us was strangely absent.
    I dropped the wooden salad bowl on the floor and it split into two easy pieces.  I left them and took my coat and purse up in my arms and ran into the street.  It was only a matter of blocks to Spine and Throat, and it was still open.  I was sure of it.  It closed at least an hour after the flower shop; it had to.  The lights were always on when I hung my green apron on its hook in the back room of the florist’s.
    But the door to Spine (the horrible, splintered splint that held me up) and Throat (the broken, mystical megaphone that made some other girl’s voice jump angrily from my throat when I allowed my lips to part) was locked, and I couldn’t see the old, red-bearded man through the picture windows.  But the lights were on.  I remembered the first hours we spent in the bookstore, Joe and I.  Four months ago, maybe more, the day that he told me everything.  I was a victim, he began.  It had made sense at the time, and I had laid a palm on his chest and mouthed I’m so sorry, Joe.  And, as I sat on the curb in front of the empty bookstore, I was sorrier than I’d ever been.  But it wasn’t for Joe, and it wasn’t for the tired people walking the streets alone behind my back.  Some of their pant legs brushed against the bare skin of my back above my half-zipped dress.  I was suddenly nauseous, shaking, furious.  Now I was the one who didn’t like to be touched. I emptied the contents of my purse onto the sidewalk next to me.
    I chose a dime for its almost-undetectable weight and perfect mint (the current year – it was so new that it shone white and red as cars passed) and its proud torch the size of half of a cicada shell, ground to dust on the sidewalk by the frictive sole of some shoe that wasn’t mine during some other season in some other city where those sort of insects flew restlessly and then shed their skins and, finally, disappeared altogether.
    I positioned it on my thumbnail, drew a breath too big for my lungs, exhaled audibly and desperately.  And the coin flew into the air, ten feet at least, and landed on the road in front of me, right between my feet.
    I smiled, maybe to myself.
There was an empty red sedan parked across the street.  It didn’t matter if it was the red sedan, or that it was a red sedan at all.  I ran through traffic and missed speeding cars and taxis by inches.  I leaned against the side of the car as if it were mine and slipped my fingers into the lip of the door handle.  It opened like a yawn and, impossibly, the keys to the red sedan slept quietly in the ignition.  I turned them easily and hit the gas like an aluminum can waiting to be crushed.

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The car was empty, devoid of a single candy bar wrapper or empty pack of cigarettes, and it didn’t smell of anything at all. There was no map in the glove compartment.  I neared my first intersection and drew the coin from my pocket.  I didn’t believe in luck, then.  I didn’t believe in fate or miracles or forgiveness or in atonement for ones sins or in sin at all or in any sort of God.  But, as I reached the intersection, I placed the coin on my right thumbnail and flipped it, catching it my left palm and pressing it into the flushed-pink skin below the knuckles of my right hand.  And I turned one way then, the other way later, and another way altogether later on.  And I studied myself in the mirror – pretty, then, in a fragile sort of way – in the fraction of a second that it took for heads to be heads or tails to be tails.
And I drove through the night.  Through days and weeks and years of my life.  In a nightmare automobile the color of a warning and a static silver coin for a compass.