ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 49
home in that journey of the night. Cold, gray stones lined the building’s exteriors, and puddles of street water filled the cracks beneath,
reflecting the city’s quiet lights. Birds twittered as the morning
grew taller, ordinary as ordinary ever was. My eyes sunk heavy.
Leaves clipped at my shins, crisp air held my skin in place, trees
wavered above. It was all so beautiful.
My recollection of this morning is short and brief, an instantaneous flash in the infinitesimal nature of occasions, a piece of bread
flying from the toaster after three minutes. The sense that I was
lacking in wholeness breached my skin and painted it red, red, red.
My blood simmered—I wished I had a drink.
I tapped a few buttons on my laptop to wake it. As the screen
turned on, I found myself looking at a picture of Todd and others. A
sizable thirty-six-year-old man kneeling with his arms out, a salt
and peppered blonde beard hugged his sycophantic smile and jaw.
He embraced blurred features of a woman and two children. These
three appeared to me as fuzzy interferences, and at a gaze it sounded as if the Porch Giant was holding his toes closer to my window…
Clip…clip.
I looked at the way he held the blurry woman’s body, not too
tightly, and well above her bottom. I tried so hard to look at her
face, to see who she was, but it just wouldn’t form. Same with the
children. I knew one played softball, the other was five.
It’s humiliating, expediting any form of energy toward a married
man. I just enjoyed his company, and his warm hands, and his attentiveness in between my legs in the back of his truck.
I soiled my prior notions of what’s right or what’s wrong in a very
baseline way; Particularly when his lips wet my ear with saliva and
tenderness, or when he would come up behind me and rub his fin-
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