Dancer

Curls of smoke lifted and writhed their way to the yellowed ceiling to leave their own contribution to the collected stain. Morgan watched them as though they were spirits, the agonized souls of the girls around her, seated at their lighted mirrors applying lip gloss and gluing on feathery lashes, their spirits dancing around them begging for attention and as always being ignored.
“What’s got into you?”
Darla breathed out a stream of smoke as she asked. It was she that puffed and puffed on the little Virginia slims giving a pale wispy shape to their souls. Her hair was glossy and black, her lips eternally pouty, her voice deep and sultry.
“Nothing.” Morgan answered dismally and Darla snorted and flicked ashes right onto the top of the vanity, disregarding the green glass ash tray all together.
“It’s not nothing babe. Something’s eating you. You’ve been sitting there staring at the ceiling like the blessed virgin was up there having a clam bake.”
“It’s nothing.” Morgan repeated and shook her head to clear the cobwebs, to clear the curls of smoke.
“Mmm,” Darla pursed her lip and snuffed the cigarette out on the table top leaving an ugly burn on the white Formica. She began to peel her lashes off and put them away in a little acrylic container.
“Well that was your last set. You gonna get dressed or are you planning to walk home that way?”
Morgan looked down at her bare leg peaking out of the crack of her silk robe. Her panties and hose were still clamped in a tight fist at her side. She jammed them into her purse, which was sitting on the counter in front of her and she dared to face herself in the mirror. Hurriedly she wiped the make up away and peeled her own lashes off and took the lift out of her hair. She let the robe fall over the chair and reached under the counter for her duffle bag and pulled out the valure sweat suit stored there, a nice anonymous black number. Having slipped into the bottoms and zipped herself into the top, she tied her hair back with a cloth band and sighed at the pile of crumpled green bills still laying out on the vanity top. She grabbed them up and jammed them unceremoniously into her open purse. She was aware of Darla watching her out of the corner of her eye. She grabbed her purse and put it over her shoulder as she stood.
“Hang on.” Darla said putting the last two finishing strokes into her sleek black hair. “I’ll walk out with you.”
Jack escorted the two ladies to their cars, his massive hands poised protectively high in the center of their backs, one lady on each side of him. Hanging around the back corner of the building on the edge, where the light from the lamp faded, a man in a sweaty white T-shirt under a flimsy windbreaker stood with hands in his pockets. One look from big black Jack sent him scurrying off, away from the girls and into the darkness like an oversized roach. When Darla was installed in her blue Toyota and Morgan was unlocking her own car door the Jack of Spades, as they liked to call him, said,
“Good Night Miss Morgan. You take care.” And he smiled warmly. His voice was so velvety soft with brotherly concern that Morgan had to smile genuinely, not one of those fake smiles that she rained on the gentlemen in the club like plastic Mardi Gras beads all night. Then she slipped into the open door of her battered white Nissan and Jack closed the door for her.
Driving home, she took a detour, a long open ended far out of her way detour. It took her through a quiet little neighborhood with yards and bike paths and windows aglow with light. It reminded her somewhat of the tract of houses where she had been raised hundreds of miles away. She could nearly see herself running barefoot through the yards and skipping rope, and later climbing out of back windows and hitchhiking as far out of town as she could get before a state trooper picker her up and brought her back to her mortified parents. At that time, the idea of escape had been all consuming, getting away from the nowhere and the life that her mother lived, that of an uninteresting housewife whom no one thanked or loved. Eventually she had escaped from the suburbs, when she was old enough to drive herself out and make her way to a big old city. And maybe at first she had felt free, before the electricity was shut off and the realization that she couldn’t make rent on waitressing tips set in. Then she had scrambled to find a gig that made better money. Her parents thought that she was employed with a modern dance company in Oakland.
Parked in front of some stranger’s house, the tears began to flow. Watching the ghost of herself playing ballerina in a driveway. This was escape? This was escaping the fate of her mother? Alone in a huge violent mysterious place where only a handful of slobs knew she existed for a few moments when she was under the lights and they were cramming their filthy money into her g-string. The girl in her railed against the bars of her chest, demanding an escape. Demanding to be noticed, to be freed. Morgan choked back the tears and started the engine of her car again. Her headlights swept over the road ahead wavering as she left the ghost ballerina to dance to an empty street, twirling towards the abyss.

The Rock Beyond The Fountain

In the middle of a large open plaza stood a dry circular fountain. The sun was shining intensely that day, making the surface of the fountain shine like a giant mirror. People walked through the plaza, in little groups of two and three, talking without pause and only sporadically looking at the trees that surrounded the fountain or at the fountain itself. A couple of older women sat on a green bench a few feet away from the edge. They talked in whispers and looked around every so often, as if to confirm through direct observation their soft little statements. In the middle of the fountain, there was a smaller fountain that held a bird bath. The bird bath was dry and there were only a few black birds that came to play in its concave surface out of habit and inertia. The air seemed to be touched by the brown color of the dirt and the little dry trees and the surface of the fountain; the brown made the air a little thicker, a little more opaque, as if a very faint cloud sat on top of the plaza, surrounding all the people that moved through it. The sound of cars could be heard in the distance, only partially covered up by the music of an old man playing a strange violin.
Inside the fountain, there were three children playing. One was a thin little girl with long blonde hair tied in a pony tail. She was wearing a long pink dress, tied around her waist with a soft belt of the same color. She also wore little white shoes that clicked and clacked on the hard surface of the fountain as she ran back and forth. Another was a little boy with blonde hair and lost eyes. He wore a pair of blue jeans and a checkered blue flannel shirt, which was mostly unbuttoned. The third was a little girl, smaller than the first, with long black hair, also tied in a thick pony tail behind her back. She wore a blue and white button up shirt with long vertical stripes and blue jeans. Her eyes were bubbly and bright as she scanned the many fun possibilities that opened up around her.
At this moment, they were holding hands near the bird bath. The little blond girl would say "jump!" and all three would jump together, or mostly together. One of them might stumble and then they would all laugh and get back into formation. Then the little blond girl would say "jump!" again and it would all repeat and the laughter would be just as fresh and free as it ever was and, after the sound of their voices had faded off into a faint echo that bounced off the distant corners of the plaza, all three of them would return to their original places and the game would start all over again. Without any warning, after one of the rounds of jumping, the little blond boy walked off and started to wander around the fountain, flapping his arms around like a marionette cut loose from its guiding strings. His head would also shift back and forth, as if the muscles of his neck had been released from their normal functions and were now moving in all directions without cause or reason. When the girls saw him move like this, they laughed harder than ever and the little girl with black hair said: "Look at him! He’s crazy!" The little boy did not respond but just kept on shifting around aimlessly around the perimeter of the circle, wandering close to the short little curved wall that formed the edges of the fountain.
As he moved around and around, his head sometime shifted so drastically forward that he would look momentarily over the edge and his eyes would focus on a leaf or a pebble or a piece of wrapper that was lying on the ground. The little girls kept on laughing and the blond girl said, as if she had just thought of it: "He’s gone crazy! Look at him!" The little boy kept on circling and his body was swinging so wildly that he came to rest his full stomach on the curved edge of the fountain. Then he stopped and the little girls looked at each other, wondering what had happened.
The little boy extended his whole body over the edge and reached out with his hand toward the ground outside the fountain. There was a little rock there that was shining in the sun. He reached as hard as he could but his arm wasn’t quite long enough and he couldn’t quite reach it. He pulled back and looked around himself to see if there was any other solution. Coming to the conclusion that he couldn't leave the fountain, and also realizing that he had to get the rock, he extended his body over the edge once again, trying harder this time, grunting with the effort.
The girls looked at each other once again. The little girl with black hair said: "I wonder what he’s doing." The little girl with blonde hair said: "I don’t know what he’s doing. I want to sing." The little girl with black hair responded: "Yes, if you sing, then I can dance. I will get him so we can dance together while you sing!" The little girl with blonde hair nodded happily and watched while her friend ran towards the grunting little boy.
"Come over here! Leave that alone! We want to sing and dance and I want you to dance with me!" she said and, as she said it, she tugged the little boy by his left hand.
The little boy did not respond but he did not give in. Instead, grunting harder, he extended his little body even farther and he moaned softly with the pain of stretching his right arm so far. The rock was still a few inches away from his fingers.
"I’m telling you! Come with me! I want to dance with you! Leave that alone! You can’t reach it! Come and dance!" and she tugged on his left arm a little harder.
But the boy would not budge and he leaned over so far that it looked like he was about to slide over the edge and land on his head on the ground outside the fountain. The two older women looked over with a slight look of alarm on their faces. The little girl with black hair turned to look at her blonde friend who shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. Then the black haired girl released the little boy and walked away, shaking her own head in disbelief. As the little boy felt the release on his left hand, he reached even farther and his finger closed around the shiny surface of the rock. He immediately pulled back with one swift motion and he landed on his feet inside the shining circle. He dropped the little rock inside his shirt pocket and smiled with satisfaction. His shirt was covered in light brown dust and his face was covered in thick sweat which made his eyes water.
He turned around towards the bird bath but the girls were gone. He could see them walking down the path towards the big buildings beyond the plaza. He burrowed his forehead, wondering why they had left. Then he heard the sound of his mother’s voice, coming from the opposite direction and he started to run. He skipped over the edge of the fountain easily and he ran past the two older women and the man with the strange violin. He was smiling as he ran and the little rock was rubbing against his sweaty chest through the thick fabric of the flannel shirt. The fountain was lonely once again, except for the few birds that still came, out of habit and inertia.

Playing at the Borders

In the kitchen they sit around the table, all different shapes and sizes. This one is lean and pretty with a cruel little mouth and matching dark eyes set in a bronze face, another is round and white with a plain face void of any make up, a simple face that reveals a sweet disposition, this other one is short with kinky hair and a perpetually sour look on her clean face, and here is another with springy hair and eyes that are on the verge of snapping shut with fatigue. She is a composite of them all, oscillating between their extremes, unable to be completely cruel, incapable of being wholly jolly, with curls and make up, neither thin nor thick. At the head of the table sits the mother, unlike any of them now that age has overtaken her. With her short haircut and spectacles, her casual pants and striped sweater, she could be the mother of any one of them, or of none of them at all. The sisters sit at the table, and so does the sister in law, bouncing a baby in her lap. The brothers come and go, two of them. One is the master of the house, the father of the little baby bouncing at the table. He has a mustache and a weathered air about him. He looks as if he has stepped out of another era, an era when men were stronger, harsher, almost made of stone. The other is bigger and has a more modern look, he wears a hooded sweatshirt, and he can speak as easily in English as in Spanish. A son in law hovers behind the mother, rubbing her shoulders, drinking and joking.
In the living room, the old uncle sits in a chair wearing his brown hat and a red tropical shirt. He tells the story of his retirement to two women, friends of one of the sisters, one is a painted and bejeweled Latina, the other is the only "Gringa" in the whole bunch. His white whiskered face is tanned and his huge belly heaves as he explains that he left San Francisco, out of boredom after his retirement, and he moved to Florida so he could work again without loosing his pension. After seven years of listening to his wife complain about that land, so similar in climate to their home country of Nicaragua, they returned to San Francisco to find that their old house was now worth a million dollars and far from their financial reach. So they live now in Sacramento, economically exiled from the beautiful windy city, permanently aware of the consequences of a whimsical decision. He tells the story of his years of reckless drinking, and of his mother’s collapse in the middle of the street, which led him to set the bottle down on top of the television set and vow never to touch the stuff again. Then he stands to teach the blonde haired gringa how to salsa.
"March!" he tells her, "Forward… and now back."
They put a cake with a little candle set in its center, shaped like the numeral eight, on a high round table. Everyone comes round. A boy sits on a tall stool in front of the cake and his brothers crowd around him, placing gentle hands on one another’s shoulders. For a moment, in the random course of events, they stand in a line from eldest to youngest. Then the room is filled with song and the candle is extinguished with a soft swoosh of warm breath. The birthday boy’s face is pushed into the cake, leaving his nose and cheeks covered in blue frosting. His brother, the second to the eldest, comes to his aid and wipes his face with a towel as carefully and lovingly as an old kind mother. The cake is cut and the children leave theirs lying about, because they dislike the fruit in the center.
The sun has gone and the light is fading. The children run in a long howling line around the outer perimeter of the house. In the back, there is a built-in swimming pool filled with dirt and weeds instead of water. The concrete around the house is cracked and uneven, moved by decades of seismic activity. Behind the house, there are a series of smaller cottages and sheds, white paint peeling from the wooden boards, rusty old nails sticking out of old forgotten corners. The children keep on playing, running, jumping, screaming, laughing. Dangerous possibilities abound. Plenty of opportunities for a terrible accident. The neighbor’s houses are far off across fields that have lost their golden color under the pale sheen of the moon. The few gates which might confine or protect the children have been thrown open through the course of their raucous parading. They make their way up a long dark street, seeing phantoms in the shadows of every shrub. The very eldest of their party permits himself to tremble a little, and the very youngest pulls herself to her full height and presses on bravely so that they are all one, unified in their quest to touch the unknown.
Inside, the house is brightly lit and the music plays loud and lively. The tiniest children, the babies, ride around over the hard honey colored floor on tricycles, crashing into the legs of the adults, happy to hear them curse. The old Mother dances now with the two friends of her daughter, the Gringa and the painted Latina. The three face each other forming a soft triangle which pulses like a beating heart as they move into the center and then back out. As a unit, they rotate 30 degrees and then back, always suggesting with this motion that they will turn in a complete circle, but never quite fulfilling that suggestion. They shuffle in and out, wiggling their hips, and keeping their wrists limp, subtly invoking a thousand years of hidden sacred dancing.
The windows of the house are small, holding the dark night at bay, framing its deep purple color in little squares of yellow, beige and white. From beyond the little windows, comes the laughter of the running children, still together, still playing at the edge of the known world.