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With her eyes closed, the rain felt normal, cold, each drop pleasant. The horns were beeping, blaring. One of her unsocked foots ankles felt the rush of water, the others leg, felt the winds brush of an angry cars passing. She opened her eyes and the rain that had felt like drops, cold and normal, turned instantly to a sky of falling spiders, their bodies landing with a tiny bight on her neck and their small legs now crawling, not running down and around the side of the curve of her breast, across her stomach and slowly toward the wet beginnings of her thighs. With another beep and a red cars true brush of her knees, potential energy turned kinetic, as she began stepping back on to the curb, when an intrusive hand came down upon her shoulder, exerting a pull and pomp, that claimed responsibility for towing her back to safety.
Turning around, his gaze respectfully avoided her wet shirt and the suggestion of her breasts, but fell just short of her face, settling to rest on the delicate lines of her neck, pre-Raphaelite. Pre-Raphaelite...
"You OK," he said heroically, gentlemanly, from beneath his black Totes and his cackie London Fog.
"Fuck off!" shrugging the role of a lady.
His shoulders jerked upward into an awkward shrug and he walked past her crossing the street, thinking bitch and how he shouldn't have bothered saving her--a truth in his consciousness--his being the savior, but as she replayed the naked information in his mind it, as if on video tape, it showed his hesitation, his waiting and his hand landing on her shoulder, just as but not before her right foot raised to the curb and began lifting her own weight those eight inches away from the gutter, back to ambiguous safety of the sidewalk. As his life's story unfolds in her mind, she sees this answers quite a bit, but those images, on a bipedal piggybacks two by two, dissipate before they actually settled, became concrete, until she thought that the mind reading was just fancy, just her strange girlish thoughts.
She looked down and the spiders fell, each rounded in a wet protective ball, landing, bouncing, rolling and running around, away from her foot, which lifted and stepped carefully down, but she realizes that she was incapable of harming them, the spiders, the drops, knowing very well that it was impossible to harm the rain. so she spread her arms out to her sides and began skipping down the cities sidewalk, intentionally stamping in the puddles as to wetten the man's damp wool pants legs and those cold near naked ankles of women wearing skirts or dresses. They began parting to the sides, while the majority of the spiders seemed to sink into the pours of ground or hurry to the gutters infinite processions' aim to seek lower and lower ground, after all it was only rain and rain carried the dirt beneath in the veins of the city, to the pancreas or the kidneys? But with this downpour was probably being excreted like piss into the sea.
Stopping, with her arms still raised, she looked to gods deathly glowing pale and pockmarked face, smiling his toothless smile in the sky. His eyes did rest heavily upon her breasts, the rain, spiders, his hands caressed and with programming and to her disgust, her nipples hardened.
Go fuck yourself, she thought, with words seeming unnecessary and hightailed it to the coffee shop with the blue blinking neon sign.
CAFE RAJHA... CAFE RAJHA... CAFE RAJHA...
Inside, she smelled the cigarette smoke clinging to the stale artificially heated air. The waitress, with two menus in her hands, gaze fell above her breast to that soft incidentical triangle in the base of her neck.
"Are you OK?" she asked and this being New York, and it being unusual for one person to express concern of a stranger in a day, let alone in the space of five minutes, she supposed that she looked to be in bad shape, but not one of those walking undead, but more of an angel recently fallen.
"I’m almost raped," she jokes.
"God," she exclaimed with a long wheezing gasp, hand arching to her chest and lead her to a quiet empty booth, that still held the ghost of the musty sheen of the Mexican busboy's gray towel and hands, lying down the two menus, one before herself and one facing the vacant side. She brought her over a cup, filing it with deceptively dark coffee and dropped a handful of half and halves to its side. The girl sipped the wood pencil tasting weak coffee, black, and with the other stacked the four little plastic creamers in the form of a small perfect leaning tower.
When she looked up, searching the diner as anyone would, her eyes fell on the black jacketed back of a man that moved in a way to suggest that he was writing in one of those Marble notebooks, to be read later at one of those post vogue poetry slams.
Fuck him. Another waitress came over and asked if she was ready to order and though she hadn't picked up the menu, she asked for a bacon cheeseburger with fries and a Greek salad, with extra feta crumbled all over.The waitress smiled an unhappy enlightened smile, as if suddenly waken from a thirty year nap, wiped some smudges from the glass of her mind, understanding what reality was and was really pissed off about it.
She ordered the salad because she was a vegetarian and she liked feta cheese, she ordered the bacon cheeseburger because she didn't give a shit anymore and besides, it was an unusual day. At that she also decided she would start to smoke and walked past the writing man, to the cigarette machine that waited next to the door at the front of the store, jammed her hands into her pockets and while putting three seventy-five in nickels and dimes into the slot, she felt that writing man putting down his pen and his eyes feeling the back of her neck. She pulled out the handle for Virginia Slims, for she liked the idea of smoking something thin, thinking of those Lauren Bacall slick happy suited, thin women in that complementary desk calendar, captioned how they have come so far. Media beautiful women in green, berets, she didn’t recall any men in parkas, sweaters, tight stubbly smiles, but a universe of tall and pretty women, contented to stand there, all worldly and be happy standing. The knob kicked out with an extra click and out popped a stout pack of Camel nonfilters sliding out to the bottom black tray, with a thud and a pack of matches, bring the image of a morlock of a man, slipping these offensive fliterless boxes amongst the less offensive neat uniform, celophane packaged menthol killers. Why! Not even he knew why!
"God is dead", she cursed.
"And no one cares said a long haired man-teen waiting to pay at the cash register, with a good natured I don’t want to pick you up, smile.
She smiled back and walked back to her table, noticing the black jacketed man was gone, but his black book remained face down on the formica table, next to the coffee. She thought of her profound aversion to any two words scrawled in that book. An unwelcome picture of him pissing in a white porcelain urinal came into her mind, the smell of stale piss and his hand zipping his pants and hovering above the knob an involuntary revulsion deciding for him not to flush, not to touch the distortive reflective chrome lever..
She packed the pack of cigarettes against the table nervously, powerfully,, but she then realized that she was doing it to the wrong end and regardless of her mood, hoped that no one had noticed.
Fuck me, she chided herself playfully with a smile, for the caring and not for the mistake, but her self-consciousness, as she crossed her legs, realizing no up or down to filterless. She laughed our loud. She smiled
Placing a cigarette in her mouth, she struck a match, putting it to the end of the butt. She breathed in deeply the overraunchy smoke and her lungs recoiled attempting at coughing out all of the smog.. She now felt sick, rubbed out the lit cigarette in the diner-glass ashtray and she felt the first waitress hand come down gently upon her own, her face wearing a sympathetic smile. "It'll be alright..."
Looking up, she noticed that the man returned from the bathroom, switching seats and now sat drinking his coffee and peered at her through these smeared round glasses. She looked away and to the waitress who smiled at her again but took a few steps back before turning around..
"Boy aren’t you fucking deep," she rasps regretting her words instantly. He was her a few years ago, except he looked intrinsically more pathetic being a guy. He looked so deflated, looked down at his book, dropping his pen and picking it up again defiantly.
The other diners began whispering. The word "rape’, rode the wave of dinerspeak, the smell of frying French fries.
The other waitress returned, refreshing her coffee and placing a large plate with a steaming bacon cheese burger, fries, cold slaw, a pickle and two oversized onion rings.
"Wow," exclaimed the girl, picking up the burger with both hands and taking a big bight, her teeth sinking through the bread and into gritty, grainy substance of the flame broiled compilation of pressed meat.. Mad cow disease... MOO! It was disgusting, the animals grease on her teeth repulsed her, but she suddenly was hit with an image of herself, bare-chested as an Indian on the planes of somewhere riding with her- well her other Indians and thrusting a spear into a buffalo and being predator, a carnivore an instrument of natural selection, but she was also thinking of ketchup and frowned at its unwelcome thought of her mind’s simplicity, implying at blood. She opened the bottle, lifted the greasy top of the bun and jiggled a read smear on to the bacon and the meat, she then carefully placed the two greenish unripened slices of tomato, sticking them to the ketchup and replaced the bun, she also dabbed a pool of red next to the pile of fries but also slightly contaminating her pickle. First, she ate a naked fry, but it was now all coming back to her. How she used to eat meat, salt, smoke cigarettes cigarettes, and a dip into ketchup went the fry, to her mouth and she began to feel normal again. She had stopped being normal when she was twelve and had stopped blow-drying her hair, and now it was all rushing back to her in the form of a bacon cheeseburger, salt, coffee, ketchup, cigarettes and fries. Oh yes, and this writer guy, she had screamed so unmeryiful at. She imagined her face before and how it must have appeared to him. Hostile, but he like hostile. Any expression looked good one good enough for god to want to fuck.
She was twelve... Her brown hair felt the stroke of the bristles of the brush going through... She remembers remaining perfectly still, the shivers and wanting to turn around to touch the other twelve year old girls blond hair... She thought about kissing her perfect pink lips... She felt a brushing of her hair... Her brown hair felt the stroke of the bristles... Turning around... The pink lips...Give a sweet first kiss...
The cop sat across from her looking at the unfinished bacon cheese burger, looking at the fries, his gaze brushed by her face, down her neck, feeling her up through the opeg formica and instantly forgot... "Please tell me of the incident mam." He opened his book, pen ready.
She looked over his soft shoulder, to the writer guy, the bus boy, the interchangeable pair of waitresses, save for the discrepancy between sympathy and apathy, a duality never the less.
"Fuck you Pig-man," she laughs at herself, the cop thinks at him.
He allowed it, ignored it, he went on with the interview, until she said she wasn’t really raped, she didn’t know the cops were coming.
"I could arrest you, you know."
Chapter Something
She removed her goggles, tilted her head back to take the hair from her eyes. As her legs pulled her body from the pool, she removed her ear plugs, moving to the station where her towel, glasses lay. The people around her were barely noticed, they stood out of focus, without her glasses like everything, save for her thoughts, but in feeling sleek, her tired muscles powerful, she thought of their possible sidelong glances. Smirking at her aloofness, impressed by the potency packed within her small body, thinking of the paradox between her mystery, intelligence and sociological ineptitude. She felt beautiful. Self consciousness. She buried her face in her musty towel drying it forcefully, cleaned her glasses, put it on and avoided laying her gaze on any of the focused tertiary figures in the chlorinated room. She strided barefoot out of the room and toward the locker room. Glancing to the right, through the glass, to the single slightly overweight, overwrought man working out in the Gym, she then looked through the glass to the left to the teenaged girl lifeguard, attempting to note her sexiness, beneath her baggy clothes and the body and bathing suit beneath; the wide thighs, her hair touching the pale shoulders, in the split two seconds of passing... She pushed the door into the empty locker room toward the bathroom. The large mirror stood before her, reflecting the tight muscles of her arms. She lowered the two straps down her shoulders, thinking herself sexy... She lowered the material more suggestively artistically playfully, first not and then exposing her breasts and then stepped out of the wet suit. With the absence of clothes now, she failed to look sexy. The overhead lights flooded really, flatteringly upon her powerful fit body, but the lack of dress made her sexless. She went to the shower.
Exiting the shower, she moved to the bathroom to brush back her hair, squat to pee in the porculine of the toilet. She walked to the sauna and there was a naked formless man... Yes a Man sitting, shoulders slumped, in a so unnatural question mark of a position; Atlas doing a poor job of holding the world, but doing his best in the circumstances. She tried to think of the bathroom, where there urinals? She wasn't scared. This mustached man with gravity pulling at his shoulders looked at her, through her and if had tried anything, she knew that she could smash this poor fat mans nose into his brain and he would die. She removed the towel from her body, and laid it on the red wood bench up high and stretched, laying down on her back. The darkness came, with the warmth noticed when she closed her eyes... The man soon got up and left. She stretched out on the simulated redwood shelf, smelling the boards swollen with stale men’s sweat.
The last few words
The sun's coming down... Coming down... coming down....coming down... She thought of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, of a lone white iris set in a field of blue. The sky was wide faded indigo and vacuous, she felt the new slick sweat forming in her armpits. Her thoughts emptied to the vastness of the sky and her mind faded, like the sky, to a basic being of emptiness; no mind... Her wet hair reminded her of the summers swimming in the Long Island Sound, the laps count is one long eclipse instead of thirty, more free, but still a grind and less of a feeling of accomplishment. Summers coming, hot and bugs stuck to her naked arms and instead of a round trip from one end of the beach to the other she thought of swimming straight out, until the tanned lifeguards whistles blew, or would her pale body slip beyond their notice, feeling a pleasant loneliness, while pulling away from the shore, like a life's birth without being assigned a social security number, freedom straight out swimming and then comes her birth, dispersal, her absence... Peace.... She hated the spring.