short story
{SHORT STORY}
She smelled of lilac smoke and hairspray, and other evanescent, nightly things distilled between her sheets. She’s a red, a dying breed, the kind with constellation freckles, and he’s taken with her. Taken far away.
She wakes up not to the proverbial breakfast of champions, but to the self deprecating breakfast of poets, of black coffee and cigarettes. Because she’s always wanted to be the kind of person who takes their coffee black, she learns to love the bitter sting.
On weekdays' six hour grind, the longueur of old routines slips by in an air conditioned hum. They play along mechanically, with practiced ease and bide their time.
After school they meet at the subway station and ride around until the purest waking hours, drifting through the city, the timeless old attraction. Where he can be her knight in well-worn blue jeans, the self righteous angry-young-man of a generation come but never really gone. Sometimes he brings his guitar and its open case collects change and the sporadic crumpled bill. She thinks she loves him, ink-dark, slipshod, so much soul. He thinks he needs her beaming red and pale. Sometimes, when no one else is riding the train, his hands find her waist and she sparks like a live wire beneath his palms, like the florid thing she is.
That year both of them felt the world flip like a pancake and be, again; different. She is disenchanted with him now; he seems so young. He'll put away his revolution-talk and happily amount to nothing. It seems they're drifting, splintering helter-skelter into the future. They don't ride the train anymore.
He comes home one day to find her lying luxuriously across the hood of his dad’s Cadillac, the fine orange netting of her hair flooding gossamer over one shoulder. She seems suddenly thinner, the freckles standing out along her jaw, the sloping line of her abdomen sharp over the hip bone. Maybe she’s lost weight or maybe he’s never paid close enough attention. Or maybe she’s lost weight because he’s never paid close enough attention.
It's so unnatural, silly really, they way she's laying there, coiled-hot and batting her blue eyes vixenishly. He shuffles his feet because the words don't come easy anymore. In the silence it's understood how she'll sink up and slink off, and how he won't follow her the way he might of only months ago. "See you later," he doesn't say.
They are strangers now.
She smelled of lilac smoke and hairspray, and other evanescent, nightly things distilled between her sheets. She’s a red, a dying breed, the kind with constellation freckles, and he’s taken with her. Taken far away.
She wakes up not to the proverbial breakfast of champions, but to the self deprecating breakfast of poets, of black coffee and cigarettes. Because she’s always wanted to be the kind of person who takes their coffee black, she learns to love the bitter sting.
On weekdays' six hour grind, the longueur of old routines slips by in an air conditioned hum. They play along mechanically, with practiced ease and bide their time.
After school they meet at the subway station and ride around until the purest waking hours, drifting through the city, the timeless old attraction. Where he can be her knight in well-worn blue jeans, the self righteous angry-young-man of a generation come but never really gone. Sometimes he brings his guitar and its open case collects change and the sporadic crumpled bill. She thinks she loves him, ink-dark, slipshod, so much soul. He thinks he needs her beaming red and pale. Sometimes, when no one else is riding the train, his hands find her waist and she sparks like a live wire beneath his palms, like the florid thing she is.
That year both of them felt the world flip like a pancake and be, again; different. She is disenchanted with him now; he seems so young. He'll put away his revolution-talk and happily amount to nothing. It seems they're drifting, splintering helter-skelter into the future. They don't ride the train anymore.
He comes home one day to find her lying luxuriously across the hood of his dad’s Cadillac, the fine orange netting of her hair flooding gossamer over one shoulder. She seems suddenly thinner, the freckles standing out along her jaw, the sloping line of her abdomen sharp over the hip bone. Maybe she’s lost weight or maybe he’s never paid close enough attention. Or maybe she’s lost weight because he’s never paid close enough attention.
It's so unnatural, silly really, they way she's laying there, coiled-hot and batting her blue eyes vixenishly. He shuffles his feet because the words don't come easy anymore. In the silence it's understood how she'll sink up and slink off, and how he won't follow her the way he might of only months ago. "See you later," he doesn't say.
They are strangers now.