Envelopes (bills) in my hand, I am walking to the post office. At the corner I see a girl in a flowered dress talking and laughing with a man standing astride a motorcycle. They say goodbye and he rides off while she walks ahead of me down the street. She is slender, her hair close-cropped against a perfect skull, and the full skirt of her dress (between the flowers it is brown, a shade darker than her skin) scoops and sways around her in the evening breeze. On her feet are flat shoes that make no sound on the road. She walks along singing snatches of a song I've never heard, maybe she hasn't either and she's only playing with notes and words. Not hardly trying, sounding so pretty just in her head voice, but you can hear a power to ring your ears if she decides to belt it out instead. She walks along singing and reaching up and out, ending a line of her song with a slap on a branch of a willow oak.
"Hey, Mo," she calls to a man sitting on a porch. "Hey. Did you see that man on the motorcycle I was talking to? That was my dad." She draws out the last word into almost two disapproving syllables.
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. That motorcycle, he just got it yesterday. You know how much he paid? Three thousand dollars. Can you believe that? He ain't got the love."
244 words | June 2, 2004 08:37 PM | Real true story