(no subject)
Hang one's face over a flame and be surprised when it does not burn. A shower curtain from a tropical mountain apartment was replaced by a likeness with translucent squares that shift in the blue lights from wireless speakers that speak trippy patterns like an orgiastic math problem, unveiling a pleasant darkness determined by tropical aromatics, steam, and the cold plastic wall in a town with a river, a horrid river that overtakes the sidewalks and street sides when it rains with stray cats that drift past on rafts made of weed and chocolate syrup curled like snakes on the border of a watery village where muskrats prowl and hoodrats have yet to howl, for I have seen them consigned to old cars with slinky rims and music that pounds babies grounded in strap-in carriers to kick rhythm along the sidewalk where they are left with the hot discarded cigarettes, waiting to grow up like the children in the apartment across the hall who scream when their daddy comes home and are hushed by a careless maternal coo that does not hum while doing laundry but looks askance at the nearby men and wonder why they do not notice her slinking hopeful eyes in their direction, yet they would not dream that darkness is the absence of hope because they are not capable of independent thought but only of registering her tight tank top and figuring the possibility of its removal while she wants a sturdy guy to push her in circles of distraction to avoid the meaningless clatter of fabric softener and change plummeting from upturned pockets past a catastrophic upturned palm already too late, which she considers is her story, insofar as she is capable of consideration beyond basic vexation, but she needs the money for something she has already forgotten to buy and picks it up and tells me hey, and I'm like hi, somewhat abashedly for slipping into her internal monologue though she has already tucked me into her basket with the folded shirts of her husband and the children's socks with pandas and fuzzy balls above the heel, since socks not privileged with these accoutrements makes for sad children, and she has chosen to deprive her children of the sadness necessary to sleep at night. It is, she has decided, an assertion of free will.