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There.


by A. Pseudonym


There: you see a woman who has laid hands on the man she walks with. Tomorrow she will kill herself. Let me speak her life.

 

Born alone, without event. Moon, gibbous. Month, Julius, the tail end. A Leo. Many other signs and wonders seen to have been accumulating from her get-go, on which I may speculate. She walks musically; intimations of a double bass between the knees. You see its bow in her elbow's wide angle. And these revelations of gesticulation are many. This morning she read from Ecclesiastes. She ate a tomato. She talked with her mother, who is dying. She cried.


She is happier than most. I can see where she's come from now. A country house, where she is the only child. This is a well-tended idyll. Her mother is a composer. Her father — there, he passed earlier, just the two of them now, they grow close. At school she dances well and learns capoeira. In Shanghai for college she has a lover, a Chinese girl. They come close but do not last . 冰冻三尺非一日之寒, you know.

How like a bad novel this life appears. There is no grit. Yet. There is no grit yet. I will sift it though. There. You raise your cheek with your eye when he turns to face you. The colors shift in a spread of mauve and bruise. It's a brief struggle to control the pupil and the nostril; I see you are faster than him. But not faster than me.

 

Andale. She's safe in hand now. Stuffed down in my pockets. She'll keep overnight, claro. Pull her out when the pulling is good. There's a time for everything, you know. In its season.

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