When The Wind Blows

Molly’s eyes open slow and sure into the twinkling blue slits she wears by day. The corners of her mouth turn up on her moony face, repositioning some sly old joke behind the crescent. The bedside lamp has been on all night. From flat on her pillow, she can see the first frost of the late season on her breath. Outside, thin, icy clouds sweep across the mountains. She separates the hands clasped at her fleshy breastbone and slaps one over the horsehair mattress, only to find familiar lumps big as bodies — not Griffin’s body itself.

No one’s home to hear but she barks out the coarse chuckle of the jolly girl she is supposed to be. She knows Griffin has been out since dawn:  He likes to visit the yawning girls putting together sausage biscuits at the Duck ‘n Go, or chat with Beau Tillman on his bread route. The truck rocks down the town’s dirt roads and Griffin walks alongside in the grainy light, hands in his pockets, hissing laughter. Maybe Beau is listening through the open window, maybe not.

Molly sits up, grabs the Noxema from the table, smears a thin coat over her freckles. Stubby fingers rake her hair into a tight ponytail. She stands into a pair of Birkenstocks worn shiny black by her round white feet and scuffs her way toward the kitchen. In the short hallway, she stops at a photograph of the father she has not seen since she was three — his sepia face hangs at the same height as a real father’s. On tiptoe, like a ballerina a fraction of her weight, she presses her cheek against his brash smile. His retouched hair looks black instead of red-brown, like hers.

In the kitchen, one of the vinyl chairs squeaks to accept her weight. Griffin has left a stolen newspaper on the table as usual — with a note on top, which is not usual. “Hey girl,” it says. “Thanks. Sister in Atlanta got me a job.” An expanse of blank white suggests he might have wanted to say more, but finally the word “Cool” closes the note, without punctuation, pencil line drifting off to nothing. Molly heaves herself from the chair, goes to the screen door and drops her Mexican poncho over her head. She leaves her Birkenstocks inside and stuffs bare feet into boots that have been on the steps since spring.

Her nose whistles on the walk. Her flannel drawstring pants pillow half in and half out of the boots. Her hands are small and exposed hanging outside the poncho, beside her wide hips. Opposite the back alley, shops are dressed up for the tourists like rows of saloon hall hussies, but away from the façades shop owners smoke or let their guts hang out while they empty trash.

“Hey Molly!” they call.

She turns suddenly into the back of the Mount Mercy Rescue Mission. Reverend Sebastian stirs a big pot of oatmeal with his bottom lip poked out, while she ties on her apron.

At length he says, “Saw Griffin at the bus stop this mornin’.”

“Yep,” Molly replies. Her nose is still whistling. She scans the dozen cots on the other side of the room. Half are taken.

The reverend points his dripping ladle without checking to see if she is watching. “That there’s Tallahassee Joe, come in last night from North Pass Campground.”

Molly locks down the joke she holds between her teeth and gums a little more securely.  

“Hey Joe!” she shouts. “Get over here and get some breakfast.”

Long Shadows

“Mary Lee!”

“What!”

“Don’t you ‘what’ me. I’ll make you the right size for your britches missy.”

Ladonna and Mary Lee were having a shootout in the valley at Drowning Ford Road. Mary Lee had allowed her scrawny self, all bony joints and new budding breasts, to be drawn to the top of the narrow stairwell, but she refused to lean in where her mother could see her. Too much black eyeliner ringed her pale eyes, stamping them into her clean, freckled face like blocked words— For Export, and, Fragile: Handle With Care. Most mothers did not like this. Certainly not hers.

Behind her, Kendra was cool as spring water, poured onto the floor and across the short hallway with her bare feet on the wall. She had actually walked out of her house with all her eyeliner on, a quarter-inch all the way around.

“What ma’am?” Mary Lee said.

“My foot itches,” Ladonna said.

Silence fell in the stairwell for a second, until Mary Lee fired two, one-syllable bullets into the space: “God Mom!”

“I’m serious Mary Lee. My foot itches. Right in that spot that means— ”

“We’re fine Mom. Me and Kendra’s not going to get ourselves killed playin’ around in my bedroom.”

“We been warned.”

“We know Mom.”

Ladonna scooted her wide hips around on the foot that did not itch, rubbing the bottom of the one that did on her supporting ankle. Her brown hair was a mushroom cap that barely covered her ears. Holding the banister with one hand, she surveyed the kitchen, the den and her bedroom all at once. The old bungalow smelled like mildew, and the sock-worn pine floors shone in scuffs where there were no tufts of hair and dust. Where had she been when the summer rain quit battering their metal roof, quick as it had begun? What had she been doing when the noise eased and she remembered again, the two girls shuffling around upstairs?

“Iswearahmightie,” she said under her breath, trying to choose between half-done jobs.

Fresh-washed sunlight was heating up two black bags of trash she had dropped by the screen door when the downpour started. They’d start to stink soon, and until she moved them she wouldn’t be able to pull open the freezer drawer. Or step over them to get out the door. The bags needed to go in the trunk, if not all the way to the county dump. But the Hoover also waited near the green tweed couch, occupied by three long-haired cats that made their disdain clear. Still too wet, they conveyed in unison and in no uncertain terms, for them to be chased outside by the noise.

The infernal dusting then, or clear some junk out from the coffee table in front of the TV? One day off to get things done between nightshifts made it hard to think.

While she tried, the balance in a paper lunch bag on the counter shifted. Like a logged tree, the bag swooned in slow motion at first, then keeled, bouncing oranges in every direction. Ladonna jumped and stifled a yelp; she raised a hand to her chest and pressed hard, willing her heart to stop pounding. The bag of surplus from Jenny, her boss, had been sitting on the counter since she came home from work at four that morning — why would it fall now?

A warning.

She thought of the lashing their rusted metal roof had just taken.

“Mary Lee!”

“What!”

Oh, Ladonna was tired. “Any rain come in?”

“No!”

“It’s bad luck when the rain comes from the north—”

“No rain came in, Ma.”

She looked toward the upstairs bedroom again and longed to be there, for the comfort of laying eyes on her daughter. Cat hair furred both sides of the narrow stair treads and God only knew what the attic bedroom looked like. Ladonna’s knees might carry her weight up the stairs, if she pulled hard enough on the rail, but they would not lock her upright to get her safely back down. She frowned to think of the plastic shower an uncle had stuffed into a corner up there, at some point when the family was expanding. For years it had been a closet full of junk until Ladonna and Mary Lee moved back home. She sent bottles of bathroom cleaner up all the time, but never saw them come down again, empty or full.

“Mary Lee?”

“Go do something Mom. Everything is all right up here. I’m not even alone. Jeez.”

Ladonna fought the inertia of her heft and took the ten steps to the kitchen. She would clear the trash bags from the screen door and then return to deal with the spill of fruit. Maybe that had been the sign of the cascading oranges — that the kitchen should be done first. She bent over the trash bags, never overfilled for the sake of her knees, when her daughter and the neighbor girl streaked past her blind spot, through the impossibly narrow space between Ladonna’s rump and the wall. Escaped at the pass.

The screen door slammed before Ladonna was upright. She watched the girls’ backsides skitter away. “Girls—” she called.

“We’ll be within hollering distance Mom!”

Kendra was turning a series of fast cartwheels, exposing the flash of bellybutton ring that drew all attention right to the center of her slim, young waist. The grass still sparkled from the rain, in sunlight that was making its first moves to sink behind the knobs. Ladonna wrung her fluttering hands. She wished for the extended family that had once lived in every little house that dotted the small Drowning Ford Road valley, with its one narrow gravel road that dead-ended at the river. Her Great Uncles Jerry and Justus in the two-story clapboard that Ladonna’s great-grandparents had built. Posted like a sentry at the valley’s entrance, it was vacant now, weathered gray without a trace of paint. Falling down. She wished for her grandmother in the white farmhouse in the copse of trees to the northwest, turned just so, so Granny could see every house in the valley, the comings and goings of every car. The house itself still seemed to hold Granny’s gaze. She wished for the childless widow Aunt Smitty, who lived in the only red brick split-level, with the real poured driveway and her porch lined with concrete planters full of petunias. Aunt Smitty, who wore her hair curled around her shoulders, even though it was white as snow, to the day she died. She wished for Uncle Bob and Aunt Joan and their passel of kids, who put in the two matching log cabins by the river, one for themselves and one to rent to passing fishermen. Their grandchildren and their babies had stayed in the spare, not so long ago. Two unrelated families lived in them now. Kendra’s had been the latest newcomers to bear no relation, by blood or by marriage.

And Ladonna wished for her own mother, of course, the “Mary” in “Mary Lee,” the first to live in this house, and the most recent to be laid to rest in the valley. She could see the family cemetery, too. She held her breath for a long moment, so that she wouldn’t inhale the spirits she might have called by thinking of them.

The girls ran behind the shed, where they could be free of a mother’s prying eyes. The knobs to the west cast long shadows, stretching out to divide the entire valley into light and dark. The shed itself cast a shadow that seemed more to scale for her great-grandparents’ two-story clapboard, tall and rail-thin as the old bachelor brothers who died there. Behind the shed, the girls’ shadows stretched out to reveal their secrets. Play fighting, tickling, one pressing the other against the shed wall. Kissing?

Ladonna whirled at the feel of a jab in her back, the collective finger of so many ghosts of the people who had gone before her. She loved them so. Their hands had raised her up, and then welcomed her and a 3-year-old Mary Lee back here when her life outside the valley crumbled. They had all been exactly right, she “lit out like her cart was afire and then hightailed it right back home.” The ghosts were afraid now, of what was happening outside. Pushing panic buttons with all their might. Go go go, they said. Stop this sinful play now!

But something came over Ladonna. Exhaustion, and something more, though she hardly had the words to explain. The long shadows of her own secret childhood reached her at that moment, covering her in a dark quiet. She felt a calm she had not known since burying her mother.

Had her childish ways been so terrible?

She understood finally. She was the mother in the valley now.

“Not this time,” she said aloud to the ghosts. She backed into the kitchen from the porch, softly closing the screen door so that it would not slam. She turned to vacuum the couch, and wait for the sun to set on a peaceful valley at Drowning Ford Road.

The Loser's Circle

Ben was banging his head lightly on the thick glass wall of the skybox overlooking the track. Cars were hurling themselves around the oval speedway, attended by more than a hundred thousand revelers. The muffled sound of engines thrummed against the glass, like a B-movie hive of bees revving up to get in.

“Knock it off, Ben,” Shirley hissed into his ear. He felt her fingers press hard into the crook of his arm. “Everybody knows you don’t want to be here. Suck it up.”

He stopped banging but the terrific reverberation continued, even without his forehead keeping time. He gazed downward to hide tears that were gathering, uncontrollable as ball bearings in a bowl. An unfathomable sea writhed in the stands, a parti-colored body of Budweiser t-shirts and rebel flags and mirrored glasses and beer coolers. Harsh sunlight cast the masses in an odd, blue relief on the other side of the window glazing. A constant blast of cold from the air conditioning held the shimmering heat at bay, like magic. Countless dots of baseball caps in the haze shifted together, aimed like magnetized toys at a mysterious "lead car" somewhere in the pack. Big corporate money had paid for the skybox engineering that filtered out so much of the noise, but, partly out of habit, Ben worried whether the vibration could affect the baby that Shirley carried.

He could not speak, for the painful lump that was forming in his throat and chest.

“Shirls!” a male voice whooped from near the bar. Ben's wife swung her enormous belly in the direction of the voice. “Mark, baby!” she called, throwing her arms wide, palms up, trotting her Betty Boop heels across the room. She tucked her head in her "signature" way  --  saying with her body language I’m coming to get you. Her spiky platinum hair was a halo under the spotlights of the luxury skybox; Ben did not have to turn to see it in his mind’s eye. He remembered the first time he watched her lean into the bathroom mirror and use her thumb and forefinger to pull half-inch long curls down onto her forehead. “My signature look,” she grinned at him with a sideways glance. Every move she made wrecked him back then.

If he altered his depth perception, he could see his own, faint reflection in the skybox wall just now, instead of the crowds below, the curly copper hair, his John Lennon glasses. Kind, sleepy blue eyes that his mother had always told him would win him any girl he might want. The state park anthropologist and the hospital foundation fund raiser—how had Ben missed that he was to be a main character in a story Shirley made up in her own head? What a perfect rom-com, she would have giggled to her girlfriends. Watch this, she would have said, setting her Appletini down and moving in to pluck him from his quiet life.

Nothing in his studious history had warned him to steel himself against someone like her. Nothing told him to arm himself that night with something more sturdy than a field jacket and a Powerpoint presentation for the Chamber of Commerce crowd. He had been the evening’s specially scheduled 25 minutes of cultural entertainment, unusual to them all as a zoo animal. How dangerous could it have been? He thought he would pack up his things and head home, unmolested.

It had been plenty dangerous. Two months into their marriage, Ben's quiet, unprying mother had startled him with an uncharacteristic commentary. "That woman wants everything under the sun," she muttered to the sandwiches she was making, in the belief that Ben could not hear. Now, he wondered how an elderly woman who’d devoted her life to raising two sons could have known so much, so quickly, about her new daughter-in-law.

Except that his mother was only partly right, he thought. Shirley didn't want everything, she only wanted one singular something that, now, was very, very simple to understand. All eyes on her. If a man squinted and held her in a certain light, she could seem to have succeeded, to have captured the luminescence she worked so damned incredibly hard to attain. All that guileless want in and of itself made a man ache, at first  --  made him want to encourage her like she was a tap-dancing little girl. Yes yes, keep trying, you'll get it right! It made Ben a little sick to think about it, like he'd awakened from amnesia to find he'd been a pedophile or purveyor of porn in a previous life.

Under any other circumstance, he would not have been here at the track, even outside of the fact he was with a woman he no longer loved. This place bloodied his humanist heart. In the stands below, he saw nothing but lack of education and the blind patriotism and conservatism that it allowed. All around him, he saw nothing but the men making millions by controlling worldviews with the spectacle outside. Surprisingly, they had little interest in the actual race. They were completely focused on the bar, the catering handled by tuxedoed waiters, and the decorative women they'd invited. Like Shirley.

The speedway Christmas party almost nine months before had been hellish enough. "Shirley, you're too sick to go," Ben argued. "You've haven't stopped having morning sickness, and it's way past dinner. Let's rest. This can't be good for the ba--"

He broke off while she shimmied into a length of royal blue sequins.

"Stay home if you want," she said, checking her figure in the mirror, and that was it. That was the beginning, middle, and end of her concern for her husband's wishes, or her child. She was going, and under those circumstances, like these ones, so was Ben. He played her game that night, of hiding their news at any cost, including at the cost of his dignity. Once, in the jumble of a sudden panic of getting caught, he'd made it look like he was pissing while she threw up in the Country Club topiary pots outside. She could make him do something that completely out of character. Her glittery gown and the noise, of course, drew attention to her retching despite Ben's widely planted limbs. Only the valets saw, and they thought she was drunk. Which was OK, because “they” did not matter.

"But why?" Ben asked. "Why not just tell everybody?"

She never would say. In that signature way of hers.

No one could have been more shocked by her pregnancy than he had been  --  he had thought Shirley didn't want children. Yet she seemed completely fine with the idea. He guessed she had work reasons for not telling and kept quiet. And something magical seemed to happen between them, in that time of the shared secret. They fell into a more contented patch in their marriage  --  she was too tired to run all day and all night for her work, and she seemed to want to stay close to him for a change. After years of shunning any mention of Ben's work, of scowling if he brought up a find in the park, she listened attentively. She needed him, she mewled at his affections. He rose to the occasion under her approving gaze. She was even interested in Ben’s own family for a change, in the speech he was working on for his brother's wedding, for example. She curled into the armchair in their office; she looked over his shoulder from time to time, and rubbed his back. Her morning sickness had gone by the time Ben recited it in his rented tux; she beamed at him in a way he had never seen.

When he was finished, she got up and took the microphone from him. "Ladies and gentlemen!" she purred, throwing one arm wide, palm up. "Ben and I have an announcement to make!"

In a split second, a sickening thud sounded in his heart, as though she had dropped the mic. His face reddened with searing embarrassment  --  not for what Shirley was doing, but for the sudden realization that just about everyone watching had always seen what he had not. It was surely painfully apparent, if you were not in love with her. Every single move she ever made was a pose. Every one. Even in the privacy of their own home she drifted through a practiced choreography in every waking moment  --  laying a hand here just so, coming to a stop there to cock a foot behind her, turning dramatically to lean against a counter and stretch her arms wide behind her. He knew that instant that his sister-in-law didn't call her "The Little Teapot" because she was so small, but for the way that she posed for every family photograph: one hand on hip, the other hand held palm up, as though she was about to lead the church choir in song. The rest of the family smiled normally around her while she positioned herself to the sound of a movie score only she could hear.

It was a kind of psychosis. If he cared more, he might try to look it up. He didn’t though, not after grasping finally that the entirety of their marriage was an act. One that had needed an unwitting, studious male anthropologist type, with curly copper hair and John Lennon glasses. How lucky Shirley had been, even before him, that life had placed her in a perfect position for her particular talents, a role in the high-society hospital foundation that called for a glorified Mistress of Ceremonies.

"A glorified Mistress of Ceremonies!" she wailed  --  Ben remembered those had actually been her words, on the drunken occasion of her 35th birthday. How strange they had sounded coming from her; she had never to his knowledge suffered one moment of insecurity. He stood in the middle of the room and scratched his head at the maelstrom whirling around him. “I hate this place!” she screamed. “I hate this stupid, little, piss-ant place! Nobody recognizes talent! And oh, shit, me 35 years old!”

Now, with her 37^th birthday coming up, she seemed very happy with “this place,” very happy indeed. She was hell-bent to be here today  --  one week overdue and climbing into the stratosphere to get to the top of the grandstands. Working the room for the job like not even childbirth itself would slow down her career. She had turned everything regarding the baby over to him  --  the search for an obstetrician, scheduling appointments, checking out the pregnancy and delivery books at the library and then reading them. Studying up on what, exactly, new parents were supposed to do with the helpless being they would bring into the world. Even the baby's name. When she showed no interest whatsoever, he demanded  --  needed  --  some kind of commitment. Some indication she understood that this was real. "How about Melissa?" he said. "I know it sounds crazy from a guy, but I've always loved it, since high school."

"Sure," she said.

Baby girl? he wondered now, pressing his forehead to the glass in the hopes the sound vibration would ease his headache. What made him so sure it was a baby girl? Because that was what Shirley wanted. Statistical probabilities and his scientific background be damned, the likelihood was 100 percent. The size of her "want" in this case would be so great, he thought, her body would accept nothing but an X chromosome.

His next question was purely force of habit, as though his mind was a nurse checking a perfectly healthy man’s pulse. Had Shirley slept with every man in the room? Two years into their marriage the crazed worry disappeared from his being like he'd been touched by the fingertip of God. He had figured out, with absolute certainty, the answer was no. She had slept with no man in the room. Each man here  --  from the mid-level, ladder-climbing Mark to the rich track owners  --  thought he was the only one she had not yet taken to her bed, and each one was wrong. Because for Shirley, when the moment came for the silky underthings to come off, for the lacy wrap to be cast aside, for the dirty talk to stop and for pure, raw desire to rush in  --  her fantasies fell apart. Sex turned into an almost painful, restless, frustrating string of demands: Do this! No that! Can't you just, just ... damn it!

Just what, Shirley? Ben almost said aloud, to the glass inches from his lips. Say it, Shirley, and I'll do it. Can't I just help you keep your fantasy going? I don't even know what it is, but I know that you are the only one in it.

He drew in a deep, ragged breath. Gathering tears escaped and dripped down his nose.

She was not the only one, not exactly. There were two people in her fantasy now, and he was not one of them. The baby was his, he was sure, yet not his, not for long. He would endure this NASCAR hell to have whatever small role in his daughter's life that he could, to bring her safely into the world. Then, because he would have no other choice, he would turn his child over to this woman who would no longer need the frustrations of a man, to have 24-hour company if she wanted it, and an orbit around herself. Once the baby-care was finished and Melissa was toddling on her own, Shirley would wreak any havoc to get him out of the way. He would step aside so that his daughter would not be drowned in the maelstrom.

"Dude!" the suddenly sober Mark called. "Shirley's having the baby!"

The tears stopped and Ben ran to her side. He saw phones coming out to snap pictures, was ready to punch someone to stop them, but the men who owned the speedway knew how to use a blanket to hide bloody scenes, a body or a birth. In the tent that was created, Ben found himself alone with his wife, in a strange timelapse, unsure if minutes or hours were passing.

“Hey Shirls!" Mark barked out over the blanket, breaking the spell. "What do you say we name him after whoever wins the race today?” A riff of male laughter slopped over the blanket behind his joke. Toasts were made.


By the time the rescue squad traveled up so many flights with all of their gear, the baby was crying in Shirley’s arms. An announcement had been made over the loud speakers, and the roar of more than one hundred thousand people vibrated through the skybox glass. The two men at each corner dropped the blanket-curtain so that it covered mother and child. Ben’s “perfect” little family was snapped by an Associated Press sports photographer.

“Danica!” Shirley announced then, pulling the well-practiced 100-watt smile from her pose-repertoire. The story that went 'round the world. Their baby’s name would be Danica.
 

Run For Your Lives

In a great cosmic twist, God decided She was in the mood for a divine comedy. Thus it came to pass that the fictional premise of the Left Behind series of novels was, in fact, carried out on Earth.

Jed Faidley had been zoning out at the monthly Town of Weston Corners Rotary Club luncheon, thinking about a recent bounce in his 401K, when he was taken. Left behind in a crumple was the navy, polished cotton suit that his dear wife had only the day before helped him pick out. His professionally pressed, white shirt lay flat inside the jacket, the red tie flopped over like a mangled corpse at an accident scene. Diamond cufflinks rolled from the sleeves to the carpet like fallen teeth.

Jed did not find himself naked in The Rapture, however. He was plucked from his earthly life and deposited into darkest Africa, clad in the last Boy Scout uniform he had worn in his youth. His ankles were thick bones covered in mottled skin, pale and white below the too-short pants. His buttery gut spilled over the moss green belt, the woven fabric unforgiving against his fat. The collar pressed his soft jowls outward, but a habit from youth remained, and he did not unbutton it.

At first, believing this was a dream, he swaggered around in the firelight with a hand in one strained, gaping pocket, whistling. He wiggled his sausage-encased butt at the fire, surveyed the scene to see whether a treasure of jewels might be in this dream, waited for some exotic beauties to stride purposefully out of the darkness.

Slowly, he became aware of eyes staring at him from beyond the light. Bared teeth, salivation, in every direction. Reality  --  foreign smells, sights, sounds  --  dawned into the core of his being. He knew he wasn't dreaming when urine seeped down the length of his short pants and cooled so uncomfortably that he would hardly be able to run. He began to jump and yelp, scamper like a terrified little girl from a snake. But everywhere, he met a wall of black-skinned nakedness.

Yet it came to pass, the assault was only on his dignity. For those had not been teeth bared in hunger at him. What he thought was drool, were tears  --  great watery streams of gut-wracking amusement.

The Natives, and God, were laughing.

* * *

Inspiration: Mike Huckabee

"I have said many times, publicly, that I do think [Obama] has a different worldview, and I think it's in part molded out of a very different experience ... Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings, and you know, our communities were filled with rotary clubs, not madrassas." 

* For anyone who may not know, Barack Obama was not born in Kenya.

Dare We Dream Now, of Strip Malls and Bars?

A short work of fiction, based on a writing prompt, with thanks to the contributor.

"Let's blow this joint," you said. "I can't look at pale green and yellow another minute." We were juvenile as spit balls coming out of the foreign land of our own nursery. Driving down Highway 41 with no place in mind, your swan-like hands folded over the baby inside. Minutes turned into hours, until I noticed you had grown quiet for a long, long time. "You OK?" I said.

You laughed. "Well, I gotta pee."

"Like you're-going-to-wet-yourself pee?"

"No, but  --  well it sort of hurts right now." You wrinkled your nose.

We crested the hill and there it was: the gargantuan sign that said Girls Girls Girls! My foot came off the pedal. "Here? It's almost empty." You bit your lip and thought. "Let's go a few more miles. If that doesn't work I'll pee on the side of the road." I sniggered  --  like you're going to squat in your condition?  -- and you punched me.

Moments later:  the strip mall, seething with ant-people. We fought the clot of SUVs and found ourselves on the wrong side of the parking lot. You waddled to the building. That look of pain on your face  --  I opened the door that said "Administration only" and pushed you through. The concrete corridor smelled of vomit, and you looked like you might be sick, too. A moment later we were in the executive offices, and after that, you were in the executive toilet. The executive secretary looked dead behind bug-eye sunglasses, maybe seizing in the electric pulse of fluorescent light. I went in with you. You washed your hands afterward, held them up dripping, a surgeon preparing for clean cuts. Finally you saw the towels on a chair, laundered, folded, and stacked on the seat. A wet butt-print in the rough of the cloth. Instead of drying your hands you took thumb and forefinger like chopsticks and opened the lidded basket beside the chair. And there they were, just as you had known they would be: soft rubbery sex toys of every shape and color. "Hmm," you said  --  "Cherry Red. Come-In-Me Pearl White. Relieve-Your-Balls Berry Blue"  --  and dropped the lid askew.

We had to pass a group of mall rats smoking a joint as we left, stoned-blind to the security camera over their heads. "Ooo what's this?" some dumb shit said, Harley Davidson wings tattooed where his eyebrows were supposed to be. He stepped toward you, and for once I didn't let you handle yourself. I stepped between you and him, and he shrank away like the worm that he was.

"I want a drink," I said without thinking.

"I want you to have it," you said.

We looked back at the strip mall, wondering, but then walked on to the car. I turned for the strip club.

"Crown and coke," I said.

"Water," you said.

The waitress did not ask if that was a basketball under your shirt. The two of us curled together into the booth. You slept for a few minutes in that place devoid of judgment, in the crook of my shoulder. In that strange walking dream that was between then and now. The Girls Girls Girls! made disinterested love to their poles for no one.

I studied what the baby gave you even as it seemed to be displacing you, and us, from the inside out. The fall of glorious curls that framed your face. Softest sighs, comfort like music in the night. Swellings at your breasts and thighs, that whispered come hither to some part of me the present surroundings could not touch.