lust
she stands on the unsigned streetcorner. it is 3am. eyes closed, she breathes in the november air--thick with the scent of approaching winter, but warm and sweet like the spring. the city spins around her...it is alive at this hour in a way it never is during the day.
a group of young men on motorcycles laugh at a joke cracked in spanish--a joke she doesn't understand, but smiles at nonetheless. they don't notice her...they don't notice that she adores them in that moment--they don't see that she loves their wide-awake eyes and the grins on their young faces.
they fade away as she walks up the avenue, facing late-night-early-morning traffic--she watches headlights in the distance careen toward her, until they get close enough for the bright white lights to blind her momentarily, blocking out everything but the feel of the night air on her skin and the sound of engines whizzing past. a horn blows in the distance.
much later, she will wake and throw open the window over her bed. she will lie on her rumpled sheets and let the strange air settle on her naked body and she will forget the season along with her surroundings.
she will remember only the piano that poured onto the street during her solitary walk home. The music spilled from an old clock radio--and the sound that will lazily circle her mind is not the music itself, but the crackle that came with it from a too-long-used speaker. she will look up through the window pane at a reddening sky beyond a concrete landscape and remember that she stood in the street looking up at the bars on that darkened window. she will not remember how long she stood, only that she peered past the wrought iron, a voyeur immensely satisfied by the darkness that accompanied the sound.
a group of young men on motorcycles laugh at a joke cracked in spanish--a joke she doesn't understand, but smiles at nonetheless. they don't notice her...they don't notice that she adores them in that moment--they don't see that she loves their wide-awake eyes and the grins on their young faces.
they fade away as she walks up the avenue, facing late-night-early-morning traffic--she watches headlights in the distance careen toward her, until they get close enough for the bright white lights to blind her momentarily, blocking out everything but the feel of the night air on her skin and the sound of engines whizzing past. a horn blows in the distance.
much later, she will wake and throw open the window over her bed. she will lie on her rumpled sheets and let the strange air settle on her naked body and she will forget the season along with her surroundings.
she will remember only the piano that poured onto the street during her solitary walk home. The music spilled from an old clock radio--and the sound that will lazily circle her mind is not the music itself, but the crackle that came with it from a too-long-used speaker. she will look up through the window pane at a reddening sky beyond a concrete landscape and remember that she stood in the street looking up at the bars on that darkened window. she will not remember how long she stood, only that she peered past the wrought iron, a voyeur immensely satisfied by the darkness that accompanied the sound.
posted by sarah t. at 5:05 PM
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