the advice of a friend can't prepare you for the tornado
Let me know what you think, and I'm sorry if I killed your pages with it's length.
DEAD LEAVES
The sky peeled apart over head as birds flew lower and lower, circling the carcass of the city. Neon lights flickered alive, followed by the electronic hiss of their souls leaving as they died. Death is silent when it walks down the streets. She doesn't wear the black robe with the bony hand and a scythe. The old world version of death was designed to look like a farmer in the fields of feudal Europe. Death has evolved and grown more sophisticated with time and you can see it in her saunter as she touches the heads of the homeless on the corners of the streets. She pockets the coins in the jacket pocket of her pin-stripe suit. The Jackie-O glasses adorn her head with the pearl necklace and diamond earrings. Smooth white skin and dark brown hair, she could be mistaken for a Kennedy or a model if no one knew better, but the movements she makes when she slumps over the dirty linen bodies reveals more than surface beauty at the cost of self-torment. It's a disguise she wears, but it blends in with the masks of every pedestrian crossing the street and her actions although abnormal feel familiar to the eye and none question her movements. Urban life has made her busy and I'm sure she has family in other parts of the country, other countries of the world. But I'm a circling bird, who has to know this face. One who sits on the scarecrow's shoulder to talk, not stalk the corn or wheat as it grows.
I approach, the click of my black soles on pavement, announces my advance and a voice speaks to me in my head. It's sweet and melodic, if it had a smell, it'd smell of lilies and coconut butter. Epileptics sometimes tell of being able to see the smells and sounds in colors and sometimes I wonder if I am fortunate enough to posses similar qualities, be able to relate something so abstract to people in words they might comprehend, but a crow cannot speak, only squawk.
I halt my steps to hear her voice, singing a mother's lullaby for a sick child. It's the voice I hear in my head, her voice. Dripping sweet with poisoned honey. She's frisking his pockets, smoothing out the folds in the fabric of the coat to groom the deceased for pick-up by the coroner's office when a portly police officer finds the body later. She positions the body so it leans against the mailbox and won't fall over into the walkway of people on the side walk. It's a means of respect to keep him from being trampled or having to taste the disgusting gum, now black from shoes and age.
The figure she's shuffling could have been handsome once. Beneath the dirt and wrinkles caked with dirt you can feel it. He has a spark of life in his eyes at one point. Short curly hair, the same type of hair that appears in shampoo commercials snuggling against a blonde with a button nose. He may have been one of those models that grew paranoid through narcotic abuse and fell apart in front of a camera. The hungry bit of another young male model stepping in off the street to replace him as he stumbled onto the concrete slab of merciless haunting. The narcotics would drive him paranoid and schizophrenic until he couldn't sleep indoors because bugs crawled on the walls and under his skin. He'd spend hours under the shower's temper trying to drown all the little bastards as he scratched his skin away, layer by layer. He would write messages to himself on the cardboard boxes so he'd remember these things and the one Death was changing now used to read, Bugs can be implanted in your ears, don't buy Q-tips - that's how you put them in. After her magic touch though it read differently, godbless, deafth bcomes us. She giggles to herself at her joke. Everyone would expect the uneducated to be homeless and it wouldn't surprise them when one died on the street.
I stand over her shoulder now, inches from sitting on it. A loyal follower as she works. Death flocks around the city, gliding onto and off the buses and trains, working on those people fading on the streets in the town. Her dress falling away to something unsuspecting to those around her. Where we are now, the Financial District, her upscale beauty aligns with the exterior shell of those passing around the scene. It suits her better than the wharf anyway. The sailor motif she wore last night was appalling, but the white short haired wig and silver dress she donned half an hour later at a night club three blocks away held onto her body and shimmered in her radiance. I follow her everywhere she goes, observing her movements, quick with surgeon precision and speed.
How long are you going to follow me, staring?
Her voice isn't loud enough to gather any attention and she glances over her shoulder to indicate she was indeed talking to me. Our eyes meet for a second and behind the glances I can see her eyes are hollow with no iris, only pupil. This explains whey they never come off, not even at night.
Until we stop breathing.
I don't breathe.
She resumes her work and walks away in less than thirty seconds, towards the nearest bus stop.
You'll have to teach me that trick some day.
Stop flapping your wings and squawking and get to the point already.
We're standing in the middle of the street now, halfway across a crosswalk with blinking raised hands counting down the time for the passage of machines, facing one another. The wind rushes about us, hissing, and I can hear the homeless man thanking her and moving onto a better realm. Five more thank yous and the hand no longer blinks, cars honk. She pulls her glasses down to the ball of her nose and looks at the individual honk pressing into his steering wheel horn. Then the car is mute, incapable of speech. The man behind the wheel shows signs of gray hairs sprouting on the side of his head and his mouth gapes open. He turns on his emergencies and waves cars around him and she pushes the glasses back up her nose.
Are you going to talk, now?
Can we talk over coffee?
She looks at her watch and sighs.
Sure, I need caffeine and I don't have another appointment for an hour. You buying?
I nod my head, of course.
She turns and heads across the street between cars and when she steps foot on the curb the walking man appears over her head. We walk in silence for three blocks passing four Starbucks along the way. Her pace murders my own and I'm taking an extra step every third one to keep up. Although there is a privilege to being a step behind her. The pin stripe jacket she wears stops above the top of her leg so you can see a hint of the crease where her ass and legs meet to make the shelf you hold onto during sex. It implies firm and it is a beauty that causes second and third glances as the sidewalk runs the direction we came.
The coffee shop hides between Neiman Marcus and Guess, lost in the shadows and often overlooked by shoppers stepping into the Neiman Marcus Bistro one drywall to the right. The walls are painted a toupe with brown swirls and orange sponge stencils of mythical creatures fighting green sea monsters. Next to the metal counter are three round tables with similar paintings on the table tops, two green oversized Victorian study chairs sharing a side table with magazines on it, and a brown couch with a toupe fluer de lyse pattern on it. By the cash register, muffins and cookies sit in wicker baskets with no price tags. There's no menu above or below the counter.
Death orders a dark Columbian fine ground unfiltered coffee with a poppyseed muffin and I ask for a white mocha. The girl behind the register doesn't wear an apron or a hat, nothing indicating the name of the establishment. She stares at me waiting and I pull a twenty from my wallet to pay her.
We don't give change.
That's all I have so I guess keep it.
She smiles wide and when her lips separate you can see the space between her teeth where she has a toothpick wedged comfortably. Death has already sat down in one of the Victorian chairs when Braces hands me my coffee, her brown hair passing over the lip of my cup as she flashes that toothpick smile.
I sit in the chair opposite Death, her hair no longer pulled back or dark. Instead blonde bangs that stretch around her face like daggers and gelled spikes in the back replace it. Her glasses have stayed the same, but her clothing has withered to rags around her body. A thick black and white striped one sleeved top and red plaid mini skirt with chains linking the front pockets of the skirt to the belt loops on the back. Black fishnet stockings crawl from beneath the skirt, down her leg, and into the top of black combat boots that have a cat's face stitched into them. Her glasses point out the window up to the clouds and she sighs something heavy, something Atlas would sigh right before he shrugged and earthquakes rocked Thailand to India.
I don't speak until she does. Every minute flutters past like dead butterfly wings. Or butterfly kisses from an angel to the damned, with scars upon our lips burnt from their touch.
She blows across the surface of her mug, ironically white.
So why do you follow me and stare? You some perv waiting to get his jollies off?
Her voice isn't as aggressive as before. It trembles with the movements of the earth beneath our feet.
No, my name is Echo. Doomed to stalk you repeating the words you say.
That's a lie perv. My name is not Narcissus or the female equivalent.
True. You and I are not them, but I cannot explain why I follow and observe you. Not with words anyway.
Maybe you should try.
You know how scarecrows are planted in the middle of a field, forbidden freedom by the crucifix they hang from, rotting from the bird shit and moldy straw until the farmer burns it and builds a new one.
I've never been on a farm, but I'm following.
How could you never have been on a farm? The city hasn't been around forever.
And neither have I. Population increases create our existence. I came from the city.
Oh, I never thought of it.
Most people don't, but keep going.
Anyway, the crows always land on the scarecrow, unafraid. From their perch they eye the ground for food and rodents to snatch and feed to the owls as tribute. But there is always one crow that caws to the scarecrow. Talking to it.
That's your metaphor?
It's my version of Echo and Narcissus.
And your the crow, I'm the scare?
Yeah.
She sips her cup and checks her watch. Looking at me, she stands up.
You're fucked up, you know that?
I nod.
Can I go home with you?
She looks at me from behind her glasses.
I have to work.
I watch you always.
Afterwards, sure. Only one more for the night anyway, but... you have to cook breakfast.
I follow her out the front door and we climb a hill towards the bus stop. People glide around her, never touching her, but their shoulders and bags hit me constantly. The rhythm takes over jack-rabbit quick and again I stand back a distance watching. Her body hasn't changed in shape although the outward appearance has and now the crease is hidden by the fabric of her mini-skirt.
Shadows engulf the street, but the sun burns the top of the hill with a fierce red anger. A last punishment before it turns the world over to the moon to lull us to sleep with darkness and twilight. They are the mother and father that nature wants us to learn from.
As she comes to the top, to the bus stop, the sun fades. The dim piss green neon of the interior bus lights approach. When it stops in front of us, she points over her shoulder to me and tells the driver I'm paying. Three dollars make it into the machine and he produces the most insincere smile and thank you sir my ears have ever recorded. The brakes and wheels whine a little girl's scream as the bus starts again. Death takes a seat in one of the plastic orange seats next to a pole that I hold onto, bumping against it with the push and moan of the tapped gas and brake.
You never told me your name. I say.
I thought it was obvious knowing my occupation.
Didn't think you used that in public.
I don't talk to people often and usually it's to hiss.
What should I call you then?
She sits in silence and at the next stop an old lady climbs on. Creaking and breaking the whole way to the seat next to Death.
I'll tell you later, when I think of something I like.
We get off after three elderly ladies with large knitting bags and needles climb on. Their was blue or gray and I think she could smell the time left in their popping joints, because she snickered and whispered a see you soon. Outside the neon flickering cabin of mechanical malfunction, my eyes take a second to adjust to the darkness. The bus has moved on at that point and Death is placing the money she took off the earlier homeless guy in the hat of a child sleeping under the bench inside the bus stop. He has long shaggy hair and dirt smudges on his cheek. The thick jacket on top of his chest keeps him warm and he gives a little snore as he sleeps. She ruffles his hair, kisses her fingertips, and places it on his forehead. Standing, she turns towards a green glow where a line of teens and twenty-somethings stand in line. A velvet rope corrals them in and protects them from the cars flickering past at drunk speeds. I get the feeling these kids need the ropes, need them to stay safe and keep them from wandering aimlessly out into the oncoming traffic looking for a nice place to stand and chew.
At the alley right before we overtake the line, Death grabs my hand, pulling me into the alley with her. She thrusts me into the brick, slamming her lips into mine, slapping the wall with her free hand. Her lip gloss reminds me of sunday morning strawberries picked up at the farmer's market before the sun rises. Blood falls out of my body, pooling in my lower torso. Two couples walk by, the girls wrapped around the men. The girl closes to us points and says something and they all laugh, but keep walking. I see them, then turn back to her, fighting the tongue that invades. I scrap my hand up along towards her free one, slipping my fingers into hers; interlock them. She doesn't give up and grinds herself against me. Forcing me into the wall. My ass can feel the edges of the bricks cutting into it.
The backdoor of the club opens and a kid is thrown into the dumpster across from it. His head connects with the metal, cracking loud, definitely broken. A bouncer stands over him, the heel of his boot pressing into the blood covered kid's sternum. I can hear coughing, but she's dragging my knuckles over the bricks and blood rushes from my all over my body to leak out through the fresh opening. Her eyes are locked on mine as she breaks lips and nods down my body. I look over at the kid and bouncer, her hands on my belt. The kid doesn't move and the bouncer spits on him. He wipes the sweat from his brow on a hankerchief, then goes back into the club.
She swears and my belt flies through the loops, trailing behind her as she heads to the dumpster. I grab at my pants to keep them from falling off and follow after her. The kid is young. Maybe eighteen, maybe younger. His eyes have a bouquet of fresh bruises decorating his face, blood leaking out of his nose and into his mouth. His jaw hangs against his throat, his chest rises. By millimeters, but it rises. Death is murmuring swears to the bouncer. She doesn't kiss the forehead of the kid like she did with the homeless guy earlier today. Instead, she slides the belt behind the kid's neck, his eyes opening wide and he tries to shake no. The belt feeds through the buckle. He lifts his hand onto her knee, smearing blood onto her skin. I look away. Syringes, bottles, and trash bags litter the area. A shithole. Not someplace to die. There's nothing to count, nothing to distract me, and all of my senses cannot overcome the Freudian impulses imbedded under my skin. In my skin. Everything that I can count, all the nothingness, evaporates into alley steam. The kid pleads, the buckle right against his trachea now. All the strength he has, he puts into pushing against her.
With his last breath, the one before his soul escapes, he thrusts and she topples backwards into the bouncer's door. The stars twinkle and clouds cover. He's on all fours, attempting to crawl, but his elbows can't drag his dead weight. Gasping. Clutching at the belt trying to pull it off. Fumbling with the latch and buckle. Threading it loose. I hear him say it. Air.
Crack.
The kitten boot kicks the slack jaw into the the bottom of the upper one, black spits out of the nose, and the body rolls back into the dumpster. She fingers the belt back through and snaps it tight, her boot on his collarbone as she pulls tight, pulls the soul out. His body twitches, eyes open, and you can see it. I stick my hand into the breath that escaped his lips and twirl it between my fingers, but it disappears, faster than a breath in winter. She doesn't bother to loot his pockets and the smell of shit fills the air. Her body collapses into my chest, blonde hair stopping at my nose. I inhale her lillie and coconut smell.
Take me home and I'll fix your knuckles.
We walk back down to the kid with coat as a blanket. I place a twenty in his hat and we board the bus when it arrives. The bus driver has the heater turned up to hell, but she shivers in my arms. She doesn't sit, just stands, wrapped in me. I see the little girl down the street in her, the one that shivered like this, because the she had found a wounded bird on the side of the street and went home to get a shoebox to put it in so she could nurse it, but when she got back the big kids had found it. They pulled the feathers out of the wings as the body writhed. She tried to jump in, protect the wounded bird, but they pushed her over. They lifted her clothing, exposing her undeveloped flesh, touched her, laughed. I found her crouched, holding her knees, shivering. She was beautiful so I asked her if she wanted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut into stars, because my mother made them the best. She nodded, but her face was contorted. I walked her home with me and told my mother. She took the little girl and talked to her until she came out to watch Sword in the Stone with me. And this is how Death feels in my arms. The same innocent girl I found twelve years ago. The same girl trying to do the right thing so it can blow up in her face.
She's in the other room, sleeping. Her breath pushes her hair off her cheek only to suck it back in with the slow motion of a bird cleaning its feathers. Quick short nips for a tediously long job. She doesn't breathe with the same speed or concerns in her dreams that a normal individual would endure. Our breathes aren't punctuated, they aren't forced or hurried, they aren't about getting the fuck out of the room before police crash through the front door and SWAT kicks the glass to capture a serial killer before she kills again. Our breathes share one thing with hers; the longing sigh that fills the empty pillows and spaces in our beds, because our lovers walked out on us. Her lover though, never left, because he never arrived. No matter how beautiful she is with a knife in her lung reaching out to touch her heart, I'd cut off my ears before having to listen to the shotgun breathing she's suffering through at the moment.
Personally, sleep is a waste of time. Eight hours of a twenty-four day gone. Poof. You can't hold onto those hours or find a way to get them back. Our lives aren't escalators at the airport that we can turn around on and go the other direction, even if we force it. Instead shackles bind our feet to the belt and propel us forward, always in this progressive direction. One third of the day wasting away into the nothing, worse than nothing into waste, because there's no productive output applied. As useful as a pile of shed skin and molting eyelashes. And you can't go the other way on the escalator, you can't get that time back. You move forward, stuck, waiting for the inferno at the end of the tunnel. It's the source of light you should avoid. Some of us aren't fortunate enough to stop walking, stop moving forward. The body tires, but our legs keep walking. Muscles plant their roots into the soil hoping with the vainest of hopes that will lock us into the earth, keep us from moving. We wake with shears at our sides with a new found taste for masochism and we cut them. Severe the roots.
If you happen to be a fortunate soul, one who doesn't need eight hours, but can subsist off four hours, then congratulations. You rise above the others, but fall short even closer to the goal. You see and smell it while the rest only see. Those who get less than four hours can taste it. They're privileged because the goal of constant attentiveness leads to an orgy of hallucinatory visions of absolute clarity. Clarity so pure that crystal meth dealers would want to cut it and sell the rock on the street corner for a cool brick. With the advancement in pharmaceuticals, who knows, you might actually be able to buy the clarity.
I drink myself awake. My fridge and freezer hold more alcoholic gold than food. Fireflies and lightening bugs fill my glass, ground to a fine powder and sprinkled over ice cubes. The ice melts and creates the liquid that you swallow. The thicker the serum, the more it cuts through the biological systems we employ while we walk. Skin and muscle protecting the spine reach out for the front of the chest cavity, entrails crawling out of the back. They stream in the wind, red ribbons stitched into the bone dragged out like a bridal gown. If you're lucky, ladybugs and angels will fly out and around to your front to kiss you and slice your throat open so you can see your heart beating and lungs flapping. The Flying Eagle used to be a Viking game, but now it belongs to a drink. I sit on the sofa in the living room, watching my body unfold itself before my eyes, marveling at how amazing the knots that hold the skin to the tissue to the muscle to the bone are. Tied by pirates. Sounds suiting that pirates would create a drink like this.
I press the bones of my fingers into the cartilage between my eyes, pulling the skin between them to focus my eyes. Everything whole again. Body wrapped into a bow of anatomical brilliance. A pile of dead leaves under a tree in fall. The idea amuses me, I want to jump in and disrupt myself.
DEAD LEAVES
The sky peeled apart over head as birds flew lower and lower, circling the carcass of the city. Neon lights flickered alive, followed by the electronic hiss of their souls leaving as they died. Death is silent when it walks down the streets. She doesn't wear the black robe with the bony hand and a scythe. The old world version of death was designed to look like a farmer in the fields of feudal Europe. Death has evolved and grown more sophisticated with time and you can see it in her saunter as she touches the heads of the homeless on the corners of the streets. She pockets the coins in the jacket pocket of her pin-stripe suit. The Jackie-O glasses adorn her head with the pearl necklace and diamond earrings. Smooth white skin and dark brown hair, she could be mistaken for a Kennedy or a model if no one knew better, but the movements she makes when she slumps over the dirty linen bodies reveals more than surface beauty at the cost of self-torment. It's a disguise she wears, but it blends in with the masks of every pedestrian crossing the street and her actions although abnormal feel familiar to the eye and none question her movements. Urban life has made her busy and I'm sure she has family in other parts of the country, other countries of the world. But I'm a circling bird, who has to know this face. One who sits on the scarecrow's shoulder to talk, not stalk the corn or wheat as it grows.
I approach, the click of my black soles on pavement, announces my advance and a voice speaks to me in my head. It's sweet and melodic, if it had a smell, it'd smell of lilies and coconut butter. Epileptics sometimes tell of being able to see the smells and sounds in colors and sometimes I wonder if I am fortunate enough to posses similar qualities, be able to relate something so abstract to people in words they might comprehend, but a crow cannot speak, only squawk.
I halt my steps to hear her voice, singing a mother's lullaby for a sick child. It's the voice I hear in my head, her voice. Dripping sweet with poisoned honey. She's frisking his pockets, smoothing out the folds in the fabric of the coat to groom the deceased for pick-up by the coroner's office when a portly police officer finds the body later. She positions the body so it leans against the mailbox and won't fall over into the walkway of people on the side walk. It's a means of respect to keep him from being trampled or having to taste the disgusting gum, now black from shoes and age.
The figure she's shuffling could have been handsome once. Beneath the dirt and wrinkles caked with dirt you can feel it. He has a spark of life in his eyes at one point. Short curly hair, the same type of hair that appears in shampoo commercials snuggling against a blonde with a button nose. He may have been one of those models that grew paranoid through narcotic abuse and fell apart in front of a camera. The hungry bit of another young male model stepping in off the street to replace him as he stumbled onto the concrete slab of merciless haunting. The narcotics would drive him paranoid and schizophrenic until he couldn't sleep indoors because bugs crawled on the walls and under his skin. He'd spend hours under the shower's temper trying to drown all the little bastards as he scratched his skin away, layer by layer. He would write messages to himself on the cardboard boxes so he'd remember these things and the one Death was changing now used to read, Bugs can be implanted in your ears, don't buy Q-tips - that's how you put them in. After her magic touch though it read differently, godbless, deafth bcomes us. She giggles to herself at her joke. Everyone would expect the uneducated to be homeless and it wouldn't surprise them when one died on the street.
I stand over her shoulder now, inches from sitting on it. A loyal follower as she works. Death flocks around the city, gliding onto and off the buses and trains, working on those people fading on the streets in the town. Her dress falling away to something unsuspecting to those around her. Where we are now, the Financial District, her upscale beauty aligns with the exterior shell of those passing around the scene. It suits her better than the wharf anyway. The sailor motif she wore last night was appalling, but the white short haired wig and silver dress she donned half an hour later at a night club three blocks away held onto her body and shimmered in her radiance. I follow her everywhere she goes, observing her movements, quick with surgeon precision and speed.
How long are you going to follow me, staring?
Her voice isn't loud enough to gather any attention and she glances over her shoulder to indicate she was indeed talking to me. Our eyes meet for a second and behind the glances I can see her eyes are hollow with no iris, only pupil. This explains whey they never come off, not even at night.
Until we stop breathing.
I don't breathe.
She resumes her work and walks away in less than thirty seconds, towards the nearest bus stop.
You'll have to teach me that trick some day.
Stop flapping your wings and squawking and get to the point already.
We're standing in the middle of the street now, halfway across a crosswalk with blinking raised hands counting down the time for the passage of machines, facing one another. The wind rushes about us, hissing, and I can hear the homeless man thanking her and moving onto a better realm. Five more thank yous and the hand no longer blinks, cars honk. She pulls her glasses down to the ball of her nose and looks at the individual honk pressing into his steering wheel horn. Then the car is mute, incapable of speech. The man behind the wheel shows signs of gray hairs sprouting on the side of his head and his mouth gapes open. He turns on his emergencies and waves cars around him and she pushes the glasses back up her nose.
Are you going to talk, now?
Can we talk over coffee?
She looks at her watch and sighs.
Sure, I need caffeine and I don't have another appointment for an hour. You buying?
I nod my head, of course.
She turns and heads across the street between cars and when she steps foot on the curb the walking man appears over her head. We walk in silence for three blocks passing four Starbucks along the way. Her pace murders my own and I'm taking an extra step every third one to keep up. Although there is a privilege to being a step behind her. The pin stripe jacket she wears stops above the top of her leg so you can see a hint of the crease where her ass and legs meet to make the shelf you hold onto during sex. It implies firm and it is a beauty that causes second and third glances as the sidewalk runs the direction we came.
The coffee shop hides between Neiman Marcus and Guess, lost in the shadows and often overlooked by shoppers stepping into the Neiman Marcus Bistro one drywall to the right. The walls are painted a toupe with brown swirls and orange sponge stencils of mythical creatures fighting green sea monsters. Next to the metal counter are three round tables with similar paintings on the table tops, two green oversized Victorian study chairs sharing a side table with magazines on it, and a brown couch with a toupe fluer de lyse pattern on it. By the cash register, muffins and cookies sit in wicker baskets with no price tags. There's no menu above or below the counter.
Death orders a dark Columbian fine ground unfiltered coffee with a poppyseed muffin and I ask for a white mocha. The girl behind the register doesn't wear an apron or a hat, nothing indicating the name of the establishment. She stares at me waiting and I pull a twenty from my wallet to pay her.
We don't give change.
That's all I have so I guess keep it.
She smiles wide and when her lips separate you can see the space between her teeth where she has a toothpick wedged comfortably. Death has already sat down in one of the Victorian chairs when Braces hands me my coffee, her brown hair passing over the lip of my cup as she flashes that toothpick smile.
I sit in the chair opposite Death, her hair no longer pulled back or dark. Instead blonde bangs that stretch around her face like daggers and gelled spikes in the back replace it. Her glasses have stayed the same, but her clothing has withered to rags around her body. A thick black and white striped one sleeved top and red plaid mini skirt with chains linking the front pockets of the skirt to the belt loops on the back. Black fishnet stockings crawl from beneath the skirt, down her leg, and into the top of black combat boots that have a cat's face stitched into them. Her glasses point out the window up to the clouds and she sighs something heavy, something Atlas would sigh right before he shrugged and earthquakes rocked Thailand to India.
I don't speak until she does. Every minute flutters past like dead butterfly wings. Or butterfly kisses from an angel to the damned, with scars upon our lips burnt from their touch.
She blows across the surface of her mug, ironically white.
So why do you follow me and stare? You some perv waiting to get his jollies off?
Her voice isn't as aggressive as before. It trembles with the movements of the earth beneath our feet.
No, my name is Echo. Doomed to stalk you repeating the words you say.
That's a lie perv. My name is not Narcissus or the female equivalent.
True. You and I are not them, but I cannot explain why I follow and observe you. Not with words anyway.
Maybe you should try.
You know how scarecrows are planted in the middle of a field, forbidden freedom by the crucifix they hang from, rotting from the bird shit and moldy straw until the farmer burns it and builds a new one.
I've never been on a farm, but I'm following.
How could you never have been on a farm? The city hasn't been around forever.
And neither have I. Population increases create our existence. I came from the city.
Oh, I never thought of it.
Most people don't, but keep going.
Anyway, the crows always land on the scarecrow, unafraid. From their perch they eye the ground for food and rodents to snatch and feed to the owls as tribute. But there is always one crow that caws to the scarecrow. Talking to it.
That's your metaphor?
It's my version of Echo and Narcissus.
And your the crow, I'm the scare?
Yeah.
She sips her cup and checks her watch. Looking at me, she stands up.
You're fucked up, you know that?
I nod.
Can I go home with you?
She looks at me from behind her glasses.
I have to work.
I watch you always.
Afterwards, sure. Only one more for the night anyway, but... you have to cook breakfast.
I follow her out the front door and we climb a hill towards the bus stop. People glide around her, never touching her, but their shoulders and bags hit me constantly. The rhythm takes over jack-rabbit quick and again I stand back a distance watching. Her body hasn't changed in shape although the outward appearance has and now the crease is hidden by the fabric of her mini-skirt.
Shadows engulf the street, but the sun burns the top of the hill with a fierce red anger. A last punishment before it turns the world over to the moon to lull us to sleep with darkness and twilight. They are the mother and father that nature wants us to learn from.
As she comes to the top, to the bus stop, the sun fades. The dim piss green neon of the interior bus lights approach. When it stops in front of us, she points over her shoulder to me and tells the driver I'm paying. Three dollars make it into the machine and he produces the most insincere smile and thank you sir my ears have ever recorded. The brakes and wheels whine a little girl's scream as the bus starts again. Death takes a seat in one of the plastic orange seats next to a pole that I hold onto, bumping against it with the push and moan of the tapped gas and brake.
You never told me your name. I say.
I thought it was obvious knowing my occupation.
Didn't think you used that in public.
I don't talk to people often and usually it's to hiss.
What should I call you then?
She sits in silence and at the next stop an old lady climbs on. Creaking and breaking the whole way to the seat next to Death.
I'll tell you later, when I think of something I like.
We get off after three elderly ladies with large knitting bags and needles climb on. Their was blue or gray and I think she could smell the time left in their popping joints, because she snickered and whispered a see you soon. Outside the neon flickering cabin of mechanical malfunction, my eyes take a second to adjust to the darkness. The bus has moved on at that point and Death is placing the money she took off the earlier homeless guy in the hat of a child sleeping under the bench inside the bus stop. He has long shaggy hair and dirt smudges on his cheek. The thick jacket on top of his chest keeps him warm and he gives a little snore as he sleeps. She ruffles his hair, kisses her fingertips, and places it on his forehead. Standing, she turns towards a green glow where a line of teens and twenty-somethings stand in line. A velvet rope corrals them in and protects them from the cars flickering past at drunk speeds. I get the feeling these kids need the ropes, need them to stay safe and keep them from wandering aimlessly out into the oncoming traffic looking for a nice place to stand and chew.
At the alley right before we overtake the line, Death grabs my hand, pulling me into the alley with her. She thrusts me into the brick, slamming her lips into mine, slapping the wall with her free hand. Her lip gloss reminds me of sunday morning strawberries picked up at the farmer's market before the sun rises. Blood falls out of my body, pooling in my lower torso. Two couples walk by, the girls wrapped around the men. The girl closes to us points and says something and they all laugh, but keep walking. I see them, then turn back to her, fighting the tongue that invades. I scrap my hand up along towards her free one, slipping my fingers into hers; interlock them. She doesn't give up and grinds herself against me. Forcing me into the wall. My ass can feel the edges of the bricks cutting into it.
The backdoor of the club opens and a kid is thrown into the dumpster across from it. His head connects with the metal, cracking loud, definitely broken. A bouncer stands over him, the heel of his boot pressing into the blood covered kid's sternum. I can hear coughing, but she's dragging my knuckles over the bricks and blood rushes from my all over my body to leak out through the fresh opening. Her eyes are locked on mine as she breaks lips and nods down my body. I look over at the kid and bouncer, her hands on my belt. The kid doesn't move and the bouncer spits on him. He wipes the sweat from his brow on a hankerchief, then goes back into the club.
She swears and my belt flies through the loops, trailing behind her as she heads to the dumpster. I grab at my pants to keep them from falling off and follow after her. The kid is young. Maybe eighteen, maybe younger. His eyes have a bouquet of fresh bruises decorating his face, blood leaking out of his nose and into his mouth. His jaw hangs against his throat, his chest rises. By millimeters, but it rises. Death is murmuring swears to the bouncer. She doesn't kiss the forehead of the kid like she did with the homeless guy earlier today. Instead, she slides the belt behind the kid's neck, his eyes opening wide and he tries to shake no. The belt feeds through the buckle. He lifts his hand onto her knee, smearing blood onto her skin. I look away. Syringes, bottles, and trash bags litter the area. A shithole. Not someplace to die. There's nothing to count, nothing to distract me, and all of my senses cannot overcome the Freudian impulses imbedded under my skin. In my skin. Everything that I can count, all the nothingness, evaporates into alley steam. The kid pleads, the buckle right against his trachea now. All the strength he has, he puts into pushing against her.
With his last breath, the one before his soul escapes, he thrusts and she topples backwards into the bouncer's door. The stars twinkle and clouds cover. He's on all fours, attempting to crawl, but his elbows can't drag his dead weight. Gasping. Clutching at the belt trying to pull it off. Fumbling with the latch and buckle. Threading it loose. I hear him say it. Air.
Crack.
The kitten boot kicks the slack jaw into the the bottom of the upper one, black spits out of the nose, and the body rolls back into the dumpster. She fingers the belt back through and snaps it tight, her boot on his collarbone as she pulls tight, pulls the soul out. His body twitches, eyes open, and you can see it. I stick my hand into the breath that escaped his lips and twirl it between my fingers, but it disappears, faster than a breath in winter. She doesn't bother to loot his pockets and the smell of shit fills the air. Her body collapses into my chest, blonde hair stopping at my nose. I inhale her lillie and coconut smell.
Take me home and I'll fix your knuckles.
We walk back down to the kid with coat as a blanket. I place a twenty in his hat and we board the bus when it arrives. The bus driver has the heater turned up to hell, but she shivers in my arms. She doesn't sit, just stands, wrapped in me. I see the little girl down the street in her, the one that shivered like this, because the she had found a wounded bird on the side of the street and went home to get a shoebox to put it in so she could nurse it, but when she got back the big kids had found it. They pulled the feathers out of the wings as the body writhed. She tried to jump in, protect the wounded bird, but they pushed her over. They lifted her clothing, exposing her undeveloped flesh, touched her, laughed. I found her crouched, holding her knees, shivering. She was beautiful so I asked her if she wanted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut into stars, because my mother made them the best. She nodded, but her face was contorted. I walked her home with me and told my mother. She took the little girl and talked to her until she came out to watch Sword in the Stone with me. And this is how Death feels in my arms. The same innocent girl I found twelve years ago. The same girl trying to do the right thing so it can blow up in her face.
She's in the other room, sleeping. Her breath pushes her hair off her cheek only to suck it back in with the slow motion of a bird cleaning its feathers. Quick short nips for a tediously long job. She doesn't breathe with the same speed or concerns in her dreams that a normal individual would endure. Our breathes aren't punctuated, they aren't forced or hurried, they aren't about getting the fuck out of the room before police crash through the front door and SWAT kicks the glass to capture a serial killer before she kills again. Our breathes share one thing with hers; the longing sigh that fills the empty pillows and spaces in our beds, because our lovers walked out on us. Her lover though, never left, because he never arrived. No matter how beautiful she is with a knife in her lung reaching out to touch her heart, I'd cut off my ears before having to listen to the shotgun breathing she's suffering through at the moment.
Personally, sleep is a waste of time. Eight hours of a twenty-four day gone. Poof. You can't hold onto those hours or find a way to get them back. Our lives aren't escalators at the airport that we can turn around on and go the other direction, even if we force it. Instead shackles bind our feet to the belt and propel us forward, always in this progressive direction. One third of the day wasting away into the nothing, worse than nothing into waste, because there's no productive output applied. As useful as a pile of shed skin and molting eyelashes. And you can't go the other way on the escalator, you can't get that time back. You move forward, stuck, waiting for the inferno at the end of the tunnel. It's the source of light you should avoid. Some of us aren't fortunate enough to stop walking, stop moving forward. The body tires, but our legs keep walking. Muscles plant their roots into the soil hoping with the vainest of hopes that will lock us into the earth, keep us from moving. We wake with shears at our sides with a new found taste for masochism and we cut them. Severe the roots.
If you happen to be a fortunate soul, one who doesn't need eight hours, but can subsist off four hours, then congratulations. You rise above the others, but fall short even closer to the goal. You see and smell it while the rest only see. Those who get less than four hours can taste it. They're privileged because the goal of constant attentiveness leads to an orgy of hallucinatory visions of absolute clarity. Clarity so pure that crystal meth dealers would want to cut it and sell the rock on the street corner for a cool brick. With the advancement in pharmaceuticals, who knows, you might actually be able to buy the clarity.
I drink myself awake. My fridge and freezer hold more alcoholic gold than food. Fireflies and lightening bugs fill my glass, ground to a fine powder and sprinkled over ice cubes. The ice melts and creates the liquid that you swallow. The thicker the serum, the more it cuts through the biological systems we employ while we walk. Skin and muscle protecting the spine reach out for the front of the chest cavity, entrails crawling out of the back. They stream in the wind, red ribbons stitched into the bone dragged out like a bridal gown. If you're lucky, ladybugs and angels will fly out and around to your front to kiss you and slice your throat open so you can see your heart beating and lungs flapping. The Flying Eagle used to be a Viking game, but now it belongs to a drink. I sit on the sofa in the living room, watching my body unfold itself before my eyes, marveling at how amazing the knots that hold the skin to the tissue to the muscle to the bone are. Tied by pirates. Sounds suiting that pirates would create a drink like this.
I press the bones of my fingers into the cartilage between my eyes, pulling the skin between them to focus my eyes. Everything whole again. Body wrapped into a bow of anatomical brilliance. A pile of dead leaves under a tree in fall. The idea amuses me, I want to jump in and disrupt myself.