She was embarrassed to have to go into the street with the three boys who had all known her. Well, they hadn't known her, but they had known her. The crazy way her mother talked.
She thought of the movie Carrie.
So she stood around in the street while her mother watched from the picture window. The girl was picking some peeling rubber off her mint Converse she had drawn on with a pen, running her fingers through her...stop watching me, she grimaced at the window. The curtains banged shut like an impossible old maid, muted.
Rach smelled two of his fingers and then crossed himself nervously, not even realizing he did it.
"What food do you smell?" Nial asked. He didn't wait for her to answer. "Bananas? Do you smell bananas?"
"No," she said.
He had been practicing to be a hypnotist using YouTube. Which she figured meant he was practicing to be a rapist.
(He had to be buying those ugly clothes for something.)
"Barbush barbush barbush barbush barbush" practically hummed someone in stoner monotone.
What she had been doing before her mother chased her from the house:
She had been dissolving various colored dyes in glasses of water in the kitchen. Peering at them like a Russian scientist. She was conscious of the soft fact that she liked the high ceiling in that room and how it was always deserted in there since her mother was useless. Psychic. Useless. The sound of colors dissolving in water was no sound at all. The air was cleared of some sort of static by this process.
It was as though she were holding the hand of water like a mermaid.
She had been watching the colors plume out into phantasmagoria, vivid arabesques and serpentines. Sea serpents and orgasms. She was a girl, after all. She was these essences, she knew. Was she any good? If she just listened, she knew it would be the way she wanted in life somehow. If she just listened. So she stood on the street with the three boys who had all known her and wanted to know her again and she wondered. Was she really any good? And what good were these boys with her mother behind the curtains she was holding in both hands now, unsubtle. Her so-called psychic mother who fought and pleaded and fought again with banks like lovers. Her bankrupt psychic mother. Who could not cook or suck a man's cock to save her life. And that was the woe of both of them, wasn't it?
She chased off a perfectly good trucker, a perfectly good idiot, this summer. And he worked ridiculous overtime. Solvent and invisible. What an idiot her mother was.
If she could just haul off and hit her in the face. She knew the feeling but couldn't quite own it, tame it. Punch her. But through that iron curtain. While she cowered in her pusher manners behind the walls of the house they would eventually lose. Let it just happen. Let them ride the wind. Maybe she could pare off from her then. On the wind of shared failure, the way people do. The way people divorce reasons. Or promises. There is beauty in such errors. Such fuck-ups.
"What do you smell now?"
It was Andy, mocking the august mannerisms of the junior rapist-hypnotist.
She was inside the color blue. It could not touch her if she remained inside the walls of the color blue This was an actual place like a prison, the color blue, but with this difference: the rest of the world was looked out and that externality was the prison. Blue means within. This shade of blue was a vivid sapphire. It was a roaming spirit condensed in a still person. It was what gave water its sexual prowess. The sexual powers that water has at night, all night. Wild water. Even the water in a night bathtub has a shade of this.
Neon has nothing on water, except when neon reflects in it. Then it might win. Like a serpent against a mongoose. The mongoose has nasty powers. You know Riki Tiki Tavi. She let the smoke out slowly from her nostrils. She did it right under her mother's glass nose. Let her press behind the curtains into the glass of street looking. Fairy pimp-mother. Let her fuck off, let her hear this thought, psychic bitch.
So her mind wondered and the boys touched each other. Their hands covered each other's hands like lovers. They pushed. They walked backwards. Their language skipped beats like hearts will do when the closeness is all anticipation. The boys. Nervous coiled springs in them like you see in hunting dogs. She noticed how they were doing this over and over. Unconscious, since they were boys. Boys are unconsciousness, she thought. She figured there must be exceptions. But they were lovers in this way. These three in the street. Dancing into each other. Giddy not awkward. They were like Three Graces. Maybe a little homely but still.
Three Graces. With a basketball under the arm of one.
"That must smell like your body odor," she said. But she said it soft, so friendly. So that it was a tease. A sexual poke. A sexual poke given out of boredom, acedia. The sexiest kind of flirtation. The insincere kind with nuance.
She wondered if she would be sentenced to be the insincere flirt (the word is cocktease, she knew) all her life?
Why was it a question? Why was she sentenced to asking questions instead of making declarative statements like the idiots do?
"Do you want to play basketball?"
"No. Kerry." She had to make it clear she understood the real beg there.
"Behind the 7-11..."
"I know behind the 7-11, Kerry." She was forced to be stern with this horny boy nostalgic already for what had happened over and over in his mind.
Did he really not wash his hand for days? You hear the thing.
The dog on the carpet with his belly upturned. (Look at my yummy, well-behaved balls.)
Just imagine the power, she thought. Why am I not abusing the power? She thought she must be crazy like her mother. Was she merely "psychic" too? To call oneself a psychic was to confess one saw oneself as passive before and within the universe. It was not a magical power. It was a form of usual victimhood. There was a sisterhood. A weakness. It was to believe in feeling over knowledge over feeling. Folding over knowledge over feeling. Like laundry. How did she know this when she was just fifteen? She just did. A puppet. If you sit on playground swings alone, you will eventually become a philosopher. Everything's eventual. She was a girl philosopher. She had spilled her essence but not her thoughts all over the crooks of these boys who believed that brown longnecks behind the 7-11 were magic talismans on a road somewhere.
She was told that she was prettier than the prettiest girl in the best magazine inside the 7-11..With her legs pinned back like a Japanese butterfly.
She should know.
She thought of the movie Carrie.
So she stood around in the street while her mother watched from the picture window. The girl was picking some peeling rubber off her mint Converse she had drawn on with a pen, running her fingers through her...stop watching me, she grimaced at the window. The curtains banged shut like an impossible old maid, muted.
Rach smelled two of his fingers and then crossed himself nervously, not even realizing he did it.
"What food do you smell?" Nial asked. He didn't wait for her to answer. "Bananas? Do you smell bananas?"
"No," she said.
He had been practicing to be a hypnotist using YouTube. Which she figured meant he was practicing to be a rapist.
(He had to be buying those ugly clothes for something.)
"Barbush barbush barbush barbush barbush" practically hummed someone in stoner monotone.
What she had been doing before her mother chased her from the house:
She had been dissolving various colored dyes in glasses of water in the kitchen. Peering at them like a Russian scientist. She was conscious of the soft fact that she liked the high ceiling in that room and how it was always deserted in there since her mother was useless. Psychic. Useless. The sound of colors dissolving in water was no sound at all. The air was cleared of some sort of static by this process.
It was as though she were holding the hand of water like a mermaid.
She had been watching the colors plume out into phantasmagoria, vivid arabesques and serpentines. Sea serpents and orgasms. She was a girl, after all. She was these essences, she knew. Was she any good? If she just listened, she knew it would be the way she wanted in life somehow. If she just listened. So she stood on the street with the three boys who had all known her and wanted to know her again and she wondered. Was she really any good? And what good were these boys with her mother behind the curtains she was holding in both hands now, unsubtle. Her so-called psychic mother who fought and pleaded and fought again with banks like lovers. Her bankrupt psychic mother. Who could not cook or suck a man's cock to save her life. And that was the woe of both of them, wasn't it?
She chased off a perfectly good trucker, a perfectly good idiot, this summer. And he worked ridiculous overtime. Solvent and invisible. What an idiot her mother was.
If she could just haul off and hit her in the face. She knew the feeling but couldn't quite own it, tame it. Punch her. But through that iron curtain. While she cowered in her pusher manners behind the walls of the house they would eventually lose. Let it just happen. Let them ride the wind. Maybe she could pare off from her then. On the wind of shared failure, the way people do. The way people divorce reasons. Or promises. There is beauty in such errors. Such fuck-ups.
"What do you smell now?"
It was Andy, mocking the august mannerisms of the junior rapist-hypnotist.
She was inside the color blue. It could not touch her if she remained inside the walls of the color blue This was an actual place like a prison, the color blue, but with this difference: the rest of the world was looked out and that externality was the prison. Blue means within. This shade of blue was a vivid sapphire. It was a roaming spirit condensed in a still person. It was what gave water its sexual prowess. The sexual powers that water has at night, all night. Wild water. Even the water in a night bathtub has a shade of this.
Neon has nothing on water, except when neon reflects in it. Then it might win. Like a serpent against a mongoose. The mongoose has nasty powers. You know Riki Tiki Tavi. She let the smoke out slowly from her nostrils. She did it right under her mother's glass nose. Let her press behind the curtains into the glass of street looking. Fairy pimp-mother. Let her fuck off, let her hear this thought, psychic bitch.
So her mind wondered and the boys touched each other. Their hands covered each other's hands like lovers. They pushed. They walked backwards. Their language skipped beats like hearts will do when the closeness is all anticipation. The boys. Nervous coiled springs in them like you see in hunting dogs. She noticed how they were doing this over and over. Unconscious, since they were boys. Boys are unconsciousness, she thought. She figured there must be exceptions. But they were lovers in this way. These three in the street. Dancing into each other. Giddy not awkward. They were like Three Graces. Maybe a little homely but still.
Three Graces. With a basketball under the arm of one.
"That must smell like your body odor," she said. But she said it soft, so friendly. So that it was a tease. A sexual poke. A sexual poke given out of boredom, acedia. The sexiest kind of flirtation. The insincere kind with nuance.
She wondered if she would be sentenced to be the insincere flirt (the word is cocktease, she knew) all her life?
Why was it a question? Why was she sentenced to asking questions instead of making declarative statements like the idiots do?
"Do you want to play basketball?"
"No. Kerry." She had to make it clear she understood the real beg there.
"Behind the 7-11..."
"I know behind the 7-11, Kerry." She was forced to be stern with this horny boy nostalgic already for what had happened over and over in his mind.
Did he really not wash his hand for days? You hear the thing.
The dog on the carpet with his belly upturned. (Look at my yummy, well-behaved balls.)
Just imagine the power, she thought. Why am I not abusing the power? She thought she must be crazy like her mother. Was she merely "psychic" too? To call oneself a psychic was to confess one saw oneself as passive before and within the universe. It was not a magical power. It was a form of usual victimhood. There was a sisterhood. A weakness. It was to believe in feeling over knowledge over feeling. Folding over knowledge over feeling. Like laundry. How did she know this when she was just fifteen? She just did. A puppet. If you sit on playground swings alone, you will eventually become a philosopher. Everything's eventual. She was a girl philosopher. She had spilled her essence but not her thoughts all over the crooks of these boys who believed that brown longnecks behind the 7-11 were magic talismans on a road somewhere.
She was told that she was prettier than the prettiest girl in the best magazine inside the 7-11..With her legs pinned back like a Japanese butterfly.
She should know.
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