Marion liked her life, mostly. A bit anyway. She liked the bits she liked, brief as they were, and put her head down through the rest. Which is about as much as can be said for anyone really. It was comfortable though permanent, in the way that a life will set over time like concrete drying in the sun, a child’s name scratched into the surface with amateur fingers. A baking fate. At night she put herself to bed with a liturgy of crime drama and soft-core prose. She didn’t trust herself with anything as risqué as romance.
Driving along in Colt’s rattly old Valiant which he never fixes but says is a classic, on the way to nowhere for a hide and seek party. We fall into a rhythm of bitumen and telephone poles, the radio gnawing its way through static and garbled golden oldies under Colt’s relentless scanning. I roll the window down and fly my hand in the wind, my hair whipping around my face. I close my eyes and feel the air rushing against my palm, pushing its way through my fingers, chasing the sun as I pitch my hand into the sky.
The girl just shrugs her shoulders, her blank face flickering blue-black in the television glare. A blender whirs and churns under the touch of a middle aged shopping network Barbie doll, its virtues diced into ticker traffic bulletins that flow like river flotsam across the bottom of the screen. The girl stares, unseeing, unmoved by the Barbie’s ministrations. I can see the failures of her life welling up behind her glassy eyes like aquarium lobsters waiting to die. I reach my hand out to her and she whimpers softly, though I’m not even sure she knows I’m there.
They stare at the painting, faded acrylic pushed against bare red brick. A tiny boat in an ocean scene, still within a squall. They follow it, he towards serenity and her into its maw. The threat of storms. Her voice lowered in the light but shedding its own upon the room. He watches her silently with time rimed eyes, propped up in bed as though king of a soiled throne, while she gathers up her clothes and hangs them on her frame. She can feel him tugging at each of the strings of self-consciousness tied to her body.
I nearly got stabbed last night. Is it still a stabbing if they only cut you? The guy standing there, slashing his knife around in the air. I had to throw the bag of weed at him. I run past him while he fumbles with the bag and the knife, nearly breaking my neck on the mess of ethernet cables and pizza boxes living the hall. I pull myself up and run through the lounge screaming, it’s a bust! My deadbeat brother sits there in rigor mortis bong grip, watching me with dead eyes and that sadistic grin of his.
A Few Short Words 