Loiter

Her name was Jazz and she was sixteen. Indigenous. Although she would’ve told you she was an Indian. There are few niceties on the streets, though plenty of rules, most subtle and essential. The silent nod. The proper handshake. The right amount of eye contact. 

The arcade was a bevy of light and sound awake to the night moths, the local and the lost, all children even in their six feet frames and loping coyote swag. Jazz came outside to talk to me and bum a smoke. Every day, pretty much, she checked in. I worked those streets like a pale ghost, and the kids called me England after the faraway place they’d heard mostly bad things about, the source of the calamity visited on their families. Yet somehow, they had room in their hearts for me, room in their hearts for daily insult. 

The cop came out of the shadows. I recognized him. I don’t think that was reciprocal. He wasn’t liked. I could name him, but this was long ago, and is it worth it? Maybe it is? I’ll chew on that. He looked at Jazz blowing grey cloud streamers into the red hawk night, silhouetted against the bright window, the bells and electronic purrs and blurts of the ranks of machines slipping tinny through the door.

Mortal Kombat. Finish him, indeed.

“How old are you?” he asked. 

“Eighteen,” Jazz lied, and I bit down on a smile, pretended to watch the late-night traffic crawl by on Main Street. 

“You know it’s illegal to buy tobacco if you’re under nineteen?” 

“Yeah, I didn’t buy it. It’s not illegal to smoke it.” 

Still biting my tongue; Jazz was doing fine. 

Cop tried a new tack, pointed at something in the window of the arcade.

“What does that say? Can you even read?” 

Yeah, he said that, to a sixteen-year-old Indigenous girl who was bothering no one, a girl who watched out for her brothers and sisters on the street every day with the calm eyes and quiet caring of a young den mother.

She didn’t flinch. “It says ‘No Loitering.’”

“It does, doesn’t it? That’s an arrestable offence, smartass kid.”

He’d never even so much as glanced my way this whole time, just another fellow white guy, a presumptive ally on his humdrum periphery. But I’d had enough. I stepped out of the shadows and offered my wrists, joined ready for the cuffs.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m loitering,” I said and nodded toward the sign. “Arrest me.”

He hesitated, did a double take as if it had dawned on him who I was, and Jazz laughed. Not unkindly and almost joyously, though I thought that might doom us, but something stopped him, and he swallowed whatever impulse had rippled for a second across his belligerent face—the urge to bully someone, his default—then scowled and displayed the angriest red neck I’ve ever seen, and returned to the shadows beyond that chiming bright oasis in the white-sand desert of a pugnacious town. 

Same cop was later rumoured to have rear ended a car of joyriding teens stopped at a light, shoving it into the path of a young single mom, who died in the wreck. 

This was a lone moth among hundreds of other moths, spiralling round a lone light, and there are many thousands of lights and many millions of moths, all spiralling and spinning, right now, out there in the nights painted by neon, smeared by blood, shunned by most, lost by memory. 

***

Image © Ernesto Yerena Montejano

Consolable

"A screaming comes across the sky." — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

He stopped because he thought that's what you did. She kept going for the very same reason.

The street had become a sluggish blur to both of them; each had eyes for the other only. Each felt only heart pain as the clasp of their hands loosened and was parted.

All sounds were muted: the clang of a streetcar a cracked bell; muffled sidewalk murmurs; the soft rustle of pigeon wings.

His mouth formed an O gape as he tried to call her back, tell her no; hers was a downcast wound as she silently implored him to keep up.

No matter.

Everything uncoupled and inconsolable. Sometimes this is how it ends.

***

She walked here on this earth, and she lived among the stars beyond her ancestors. If you had seen her liquid emerald eyes, folded with molten gold, you would have stood in one place forever, unable to move with the sorrowing weight of her grief and the burden of her arcane glamour. She will never return to this place, and her absence will prove calamitous.

Lovetar, Kali, Menhit, Lamia, Scylla and Charybdis, in your passing all colour fades, all song has fallen mute on brittle ears. We beseech you. Pain is a dance and truth is also a place. Come back to us. Even as the bay doors open, even as the poison seeds fall, even at the moment of our eradication.

***

Here we are in the violet night, spilling from our front doors, tumbling down our steps, hurtling into a riotous haze of utter disbelief.

***

She called herself Glass because most everyone looked through her and she was easily shattered. She had a single tattoo on her midriff, of an open window.

Between her skinny legs Montgomery breathed easy, safe and partway warm on concrete paving in his cocoon of threadbare denim. Government Street in April.

"Is your dog friendly?" A woman, thirtysomething.

"Monty. Sure," said Glass.

The woman reached to pet him, and Glass didn't breathe. Monty glanced at her and decided it was okay and extended his disheveled neck for a scratch, and then Glass breathed.

"I see you every day, and every day I think I should speak to you." The woman obliged Monty, who smiled, his pink tongue draped on his teeth, somewhere between solid and liquid. Glass said nothing, though she recalled the woman from the beauty salon a block or two away.

A man across the street yelled something over the early traffic. He sounded hoarse and weary.

"Look. It's not right you should have to lie on this sidewalk while folks no better than you drive by in luxury."

"Someone's gotta do it. May as well be me."

The woman sighed and stared at her. Glass wished she'd stop. She felt like she was transparent again and the woman was staring holes in the sidewalk. There was a silence that stretched too long.

"What do you want from me, lady? How about you give me a couple loonies and go on with your day?"

"I'll give you more than a couple loonies if you come help me clean up the salon."

Glass squinted up at her. The sun had moved higher, and the woman was a dark grey construction paper cutout. Glass thought she heard a herring gull cry, "Beware!" Monty made his teakettle sound of unease.

"Don't know nothing about beauty," she finally said, and a word came into her thoughts: exfoliate. Sounded like something to do with horse abortions. Yet it sounded pretty too. That's what was so weird about the world, pretty hiding inside all that ugly.

Across the street, the man yelled again, and Monty barked, once. This time, Glass heard the words.

"They did it. It's fucking happening!" There had been fear and astonishment in those words. And in Monty's short bark, there was a world of companionship and love and a lifetime of cold huddled nights and all the withstood scorn of passing strangers and the words oh please no oh please.

The pretty woman looked up, and she was a puzzled lens that concentrated the white and terrible sun as it fell toward each and everyone equally, the kind and the cruel.

None stood a chance. Not grifters, not bankers, not pimps, not actors, not teachers, not lovers, not empathetic beauticians, not streetworn kids and their tousled, loveable dogs. Not even, especially not, the dreamers of dreams.

***

She walked out of the infirmary, dragged her damaged limbs over moorland, mists swirling like her jettisoned conscience, the sun a rusted coin, the vast quiet dome of the sky above the earth hushed as the fading notes of a requiem.

***

After the screaming, the awful woe, and then the blessed silence.