"Raving? Nonsense, my little sparrow!...So I'm strange, am I? Well, and are you curious about me?"

Dec 15, 2004 22:49

I wrote this partly while I was in Barnes and Noble alone last week waiting to pick up Madeline and partly now at home on my computer. It's definitely a breath of fresh air after writing dry and pretty awful English class assignments for so long. Any comments/advice/critiques would be much welcome and appreciated.

“Grande, please,” the woman commands, as she pulls her moldy purse up and off her arm, reaching deep inside its drooling, widened mouth. The boy behind the counter, hugged and pressed by the corporate apron that reminds him fondly of a simpler time (when art class taught him that art, play, and life were once interchangeable), turns to the back wall, pouring 1/8 coffee, 1/8 milk, 1/2 ice, and 1/4 mildewed regret into a plastic cup that slides across the counter. He closes it with his hand, picking it up to shake and rattle the flimsy cup like a noisemaker on New Year’s. His name tag shines in the flourescent light, all his faults magnified against the plastic reflection of chilled glass. He asks the woman if she’d like anything else with that. A cookie, perhaps?

The woman rocks her head and walks away, her heels clicking and hips swaying to the poetry of new American culture.

She beats upon the black and white checkered tiles as she saunters out, as only the queen may move freely on a chessboard, out from under the lights and out from between the pushing shelves that grow and crush and out from under the clear iced glass that curves.

She pulls open the door to a rush of wind that screams at her like a hawk swooping down from the skies.

The boy picks up a blistered rag and wipes away at the drops that leapt from the woman’s cup. The door sinks back into its frame behind her as the the invisible tracks her heels left on the black and white tiles scream, “Checkmate.”
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