After-work:

Long, stealing cat shadows follow her down the city blocks. A corner. This is where that music, that noise, jangling polyrhythms had first assaulted and enveloped her. She is destroyed inside the memory, and chokes; quickly, a moment of pain in memoriam. Then she walks on.

The apartment where she lives is always stuffy, hot, musky. The living is too close. The living ain't easy. She had wanted to know all the secrets anyway, and had thought this blatant knowledge of life-smells would teach them. It only suffocates them, she found.

She throws open the kitchenette window, wanting the sour smell of greens and pork to sail away on a twilight breeze. Home. Home is. No complete sentence forms itself in her irritated mind. Her mind itching in the heat and odor of close living. Home is here, here is home; and it stinks. She is alone, and her life is somewhere else.

Her ritual, deliberate sinning, of the afternoon cigarette and beer begins. Her ritual of reorienting herself to this place of odd noises and smells. She snaps the radio on. The jive soul station. The jive rap of a jive brother, and the ditty-bop love songs. It all soothes over her current terror with pastel washes of nostalgia. Except sometimes the bouncing bass of the dj, startling her with its abrasive masculinity. Making her remember. Discord.

She never bothers to turn on the lights, and as the early evening fades to night, the walls grow ever-closer to her now inert body. She is dozing on the sofa; the beer three-quarters gone. The ash-tray speckled and dusted with the remnants of four half-finished cigarettes.

She is sleeping through the descending darkness. She does not see the lessening light which produces strange crying shadows on the walls and floor. When she awakens, she will smell rather than see the dingy orange glow. The advent of the day's hour which always bring her wandering to it's unsatisfied end. The hour of streetlights and sharp rank neon. She will smell the colors, and the time, rather than see them.

Nothing moves. The station has gone off the air, and an irritating static buzz sings out from the radio, infrequently interrupted by clamourous chimings of beeps and rings and bits of voices. She is awake. The tension in her. Struggling to make the decision to move. The tautness increasing. This maddening tension as she fights feeling morbid about paralysis. She wants to love it. It is only that, if she does not conquer it, she will never be able to answer demands upon her. So? She equates abulia with original sin. Not like cigarettes, drinking, etc. She laughs. Come on woman, do it! The tremor of the laugh tickles down her body again. Then, finally, her eyes open of their own accord, and she rolls over and sits up.

On time. The doorbell rings. She laughs again.

Trapped-in-rain:

She always forgot what time of the day it was. In fact, what time of the day it might possibly be, whenever the summer warmth magically changed, into this special sort of rain. Oh; and if the sun shone down just this way, not sparkling in that fertile vernal brightness, but muted, and almost invisible. The sun singing this gentle and soft gray song, like drumsticks covered with cotton, or felt; beating very softly on a loosened skin.

This quiet light wouldn't expose everything, only scattered pieces of the world, and glitter for a moment. It made the world seem broken, and smaller; as if dispresed from a thunderstorm, and shattered and bedraggled.

She thought of wine and grinned to herself. The world is a broken Ripple bottle. Yes, yes, a ripped apart Ripple bottle. Some still glistening fragment attracted her eye and absorbed her. Timeless. Rhythm of timelessness; timeless ocean waves. Her endless drift of unconcerned thinking. A sailing without a goal, or known beginning. A hum started out of her sea-faring self; a song of bright, free ships.

She could taste the freedom. She hummed and felt along her vibrant tongue the sweetness and honeyed warmth of freedom. To awaken was a dying.

Suddenly the Ripple bottle was whole again. A sharp cry passed from her mouth. She was starving. The sharp focus made her delerious. The dreaming, the floating had known no boundaries but suddenly all the edges had returned.