SmokeLong Quarterly

She thinks of birth, giving birth to herself, becoming another person, another dimension of a person. She taps dust with a fingertip. Her hand becomes a mystery of veins and light flickering from the edges.

She tells them she doesn’t feel anything and then her head rests on the arm of the couch. Freddy Mercury sings, “Mama, just killed a man, put a gun against his head…,” sounding so wonderful, filling the room. The singing and the story and the musicians all come in the room at once. She could touch them all. Bubba laughs, “You’re taking off now.”

“Why, Bubba?” she asks, meaning, why that name. A man so soft eyed and full lipped.

Another man, her lover, sits beside her. The girl has not married him yet. She is seventeen. She lives with him in a little apartment that smells like metal and gasoline. He sits beside her watching the air. He is the only one who has ever been her lover.

On the wall hangs a shellacked photo of a guitar and flowers. Blankets cover the furniture. Through the doorway from the living room to the kitchen she sees the woman of the house standing in the open refrigerator. Bubba’s wife. The woman of the house nibbles on a block of cheese like a rat.

The girl laughs. “Look! She’s eating cheese!” The air from the refrigerator sweeps in and chills her. The woman of the house begins to cry. “Stop laughing at me.”

“Hush,” Bubba says. He has his hand on the girl’s knee, moving her dress up a little higher on her thigh. She watches. “I’m cold,” she says and Bubba rises to turn up the heat.

“What are you doing?” asks the woman of the house. She’s come into the entrance now still holding the cheese.

“She’s cold,” Bubba says.

“Then throw her little ass out in the yard.”

The girl laughs because she knows the woman should be jealous, has every right to be jealous, but rights don’t make any sense. The dress cloth brushes tiny hairs against her thigh. Music grows and colorful birds sing in a giant cage. Everything is so beautiful with all the light trailing round.