ARR 1988 - Flipbook - Page 53
some lark with this guy whose hair (she suddenly noticed.) was recently
getting a little long (or was it?) and who had insulted a perfectly sensible
breakfast. She began to wonder what was going on here. Was he on the verge
of a monstrous crash, in which case she felt she should be more sympathetic?
Or was he really just getting weirded out by the coke? Or was he showing
a side of his personality that he had kept conveniently hidden from her until
he found someone else to sleep with?
Just in case her first suspicions were true, she reached into the drawer
again and pulled out the second quarter gram bag, the last in the apartment.
This she slipped into the hidden pocket of her purse.
He remained standing by the open window, the smoke from his cigarette encircling his head like a cancerous blue halo. He said nothing, but
watched intently as bits of ash drifted down on casual tremors of wind. He
even started to take aim in his imagination, hoping the grey cinders would
land where he wanted. He aimed at an old lady's head, a commuter's plaid
sport coat, the shining blue cap of a policeman. He smiled as a glowing red
ember broke apart from the end of his cigarette and fell down along the
building's facade, both turning grey and disappearing, and then chased it
with a wad of spit that he had been forming in his mouth. He wanted to see
if the spit would hit the ground before the cherry of his cigarette; and better
yet, if the spit could actually catch and extinguish it in mid-flight.
He lost interest before he could find out, however, and he flipped on a
cube-shaped radio, crouching on the radiator beneath the window. The
sneaky, sexy voice of a woman sang a song in Yiddish, and the heels of Anna's
pumps clicked like a metronome on the linoleum as she walked away.
Geoffrey Nutter
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