by Alex Rost
****
This rail thin lady smoking a long, skinny cigarette catches me coming out of the discount grocery store on my lunch break.
“Hey,” she says. “Can I ask you something?”
I stop, say sure.
She has a rash all around her mouth. Red, but peeling too. White flakes of dead skin.
“Why does the water pole gotta have firemen on it?”
She uses her cigarette hand to point at the baby blue water tower on the other side of the parking lot, at the mural up there of two firefighters, one kneeling in the green grass at the feet of a small girl, tying her shoe or some shit, fluffy clouds and a rippling American flag behind them.
“I don’t know.”
She takes a drag from her cig, lips folding in some, chuckle/scoff/coughs, and says, “Why they gotta put firemen on the fuckin water pole?”
“You’re right,” I say, not giving a fuck.
I nod and walk away, look back from my open car door and see her holding the long, skinny cigarette in front of her mouth but not smoking, her hand hovering over the rash, fingers picking idly, and she shakes her head all slow and smiles at the water tower.
Thoroughly enjoying her day.
****
I close my eyes while driving just for the shock of opening them.
I count the seconds—one… two… three… four…
I take notice of time. Feel slivers of moments. The fractions within milliseconds.
Five…
And imagine a collision. Bodies in the air. Pretend I know pain.
Six…
I open my eyes, hop the curb to the gas station and rush in to grab a buy-two-get-one- free-energy drink, hand the kid behind the counter dirty change and soggy singles and apologize/lie, saying I left my wallet at home. The kid counts the filthy money and loads it into the drawer, his upper lip curled. He watches me sniff my hand then hesitates for a moment before sniffing his own hand.
And I know what he’s thinking because I’m thinking the same thing—My fingers smell like sticky pennies, but the pennies are gone, and that’s now the smell of me. But he’ll get used to it. We all do.
****
I’m on lunch, parked around the corner from the shop in a residential neighborhood and this guy in a shiny red pickup keeps doing laps, driving by real slow while eye fucking me. After his third pass, he parks down the street and sits in his car.
He’s watching me, I’m watching him, and I figure he’s on some beguiled righteous guardian crusade, safeguarding his shitty neighborhood from peculiar loiterers with undefined intentions. I’m just about to drive around the block and park behind him to give him a new development to contemplate when he gets out of his truck and comes down the sidewalk, stops like ten feet away and says, “How’s it going?”
He’s a big dude, three fifty easy, straight fat, with his stretch marked gut hanging out below his tank top and holding a half empty two-liter.
“Good,” I say, and go back to playing on my phone.
He stares off down the block but doesn’t move, and I sneak sidelong glances at him until he finally waddles his ass up the walkway of a small apartment complex.
He stops right before he gets in the door and turns to look at me again. He unscrews the top of his two liter and brings it to his lips, tilts his head back, all the way back, and guzzles every fucking drop, his stretch marked gut rippling with the effort.
He disappears into the apartment complex and I think about the gift I gave him, that momentary surge of power, and for a second, I miss him, and decide I’ll be back tomorrow.
****
Something’s dangling from my beard. I feel it tickle my neck. It clings to tangled, brittle hairs and I wince as I pull it out. It’s lint, but some sort of expanded lint. Like lint that has been lint for a long time. Partly petrified, like old lint found new lint and became an entirely different breed of lint. Multiple generations of lint in one lint. Stringy, like along the way it found a bit of hair, but the hair is now indistinguishable from lint. Like it had renounced being a hair, deciding instead to spend its existence as lint.
I flick it, see it flutter, one brief rise in the air before it’s sucked out of my car's window. Onto another kind of life.