Reasons to be Beautiful (standard:other, 6163 words)
Author: Reed Alexander	Added: Aug 28 2007	Views/Reads: 3228/2130	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
a bored housewife and mother finds a herself in startling new ways when a new neighbor moves in next door.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

mother's nice oak hutch. We were the lie of Normal Rockwell—may the 
bastard rot in hell. 

I had a good husband. I had a handsome son. I had a Buck, the obligatory
Golden Retriever outside. I had a nice house in the suburbs of 
Maryland. I had a white picket fence. My neighbors brought us cookies 
when we moved in. I had a college diploma tucked away somewhere. I had 
a good set of china, and lots of lace doilies scattered around the 
house. I had a fucking mini-van, for Christ's sake. 

I remembered when we had owned a milk-crate instead of an entertainment
center, when we had to wrap the TV antenna—or was the plural form 
'antenni'—in foil, when our mattress had seen more wear than a 
Vietnamese hooker. I remembered owning a Volkswagen bus. I remembered 
thinking duct tape could fix anything. I remembered when Richard and I 
had still bothered to look at each other. I remembered when I was not a 
pork chop. 

Richard did want to have sex that night. 

I climbed into bed in my least inspiring flannel gown. Its cut was
billowing and high-necked, almost Victorian in style. He spooned 
against me, his cock stiff and jutting like the prow of a ship, leading 
the way into the night. He wasn't holding me; he was letting me know 
what he wanted. 

He teased me for a while, or maybe his aim was just impaired, because he
rubbed around for a few minutes before wedging himself inside. I came 
to the conclusion that we had just had foreplay. My hands reach for 
their place on his spine, the bony knobs of his vertebrae rolling under 
my fingers. He sawed back and forth inside me and my body began to 
react, finding its place in the act. He panted on me, hot, humid 
breaths forcing their way into my mouth. I lifted my hips, taking him 
deeper inside. He sped up, his dick shutting down his brain. I groaned 
as his frantic movements ground his pelvis between my legs like a 
sporadic vibrator. He jerked inside me, once, twice, thrusting deeper, 
and then spurted. It felt like warm buttermilk and I gasped. I jerked 
my hips up sharply to bring myself over. I came. I was unimpressed. I 
wondered why my body had bothered. I wondered if it was to induce the 
milking spasms in my vaginal muscles. I wondered if it was Nature's way 
of insuring that the biological imperative was not ignored. It didn't 
matter. 

It doesn't matter, I told my body silently. He's fixed. 

Give me a reason to be beautiful So sick in his body, so sick in his
soul And I will make myself so beautiful And everything I am... 

I brought her cookies on one of my good china plates when she moved in
next door. 

I saw the U-Haul truck pull into the McClure's former driveway. It was
one of the small ones; a faded mural racehorse strained in profile on 
the side of the trailer. She got out, a tiny little redhead dressed in 
black running pants and a black tank top. Two white stripes ran 
vertically down the outside of the legs; and nobody had hips like that 
outside of magazines. If she was over twelve, I might have to hate her. 


I peered out my dining room window like the nosy neighbor on Bewitched.
I saw nice arms, and a bright red and green and gold snake wrapped 
around her left bicep. I saw flame red hair that had to be out of a 
Clairol bottle. I wondered where her parents were. 

Her parents never showed. I guessed maybe she was not twelve. 

Cruz had a soccer game, so I didn't get around to making cookies until
the following Monday. When I did, they were white chocolate macadamia 
nut cookies. Yes, it was just a fancy way of doing chocolate chip...but 
cookies say a lot about a person. Oatmeal is boring, chocolate chip is 
passé, white chocolate macadamia nut is passé with a twist, and that 
was me in a nutshell. So what if the twist was mostly in my own mind? 
There was a part of me that still read romance novels and knew that I, 
just like the Lady Gwendolyn St. Eire, would have kneed the dastardly 
but dashing pirate "Lance" in the privates the first time he tried to 
ravish me, and that I, just like the Lady Gwendolyn St. Eire, would 
have eventually succumbed to his throbbing manhood and turgid desire. 
It was the part of me that knew I was more than just a pork chop, that 
I had a twist, even if it were only in my own thoughts. 

I was babbling to myself, nervous as usual at the prospect of meeting
someone new. I fortified myself with the knowledge that I made 
excellent cookies. I worried that maybe she would keep my good china 
plate. It would break one of my eight settings. 

She answered the door before I was ready. I had been standing on the
porch too long, almost deciding that she was out or busy. I had decided 
to ring the doorbell once more just to be certain and my finger was 
out, poised to punch the button one more time, when the door swung open 
and she stood there. 

It was hard not to stare. She was not what usually moves into
cul-de-sacs in Maryland suburbia. 

Flame colored hair was what would always come to mind when I thought of
her. A little past the shoulder, long, straight layers framed her face 
and brought out the milky complexion of a true redhead. Her eyes were 
hazel and blue and green and deep set, her mouth full, with an elfish 
mobility and curl at the corners. She was not as young as I had 
thought; lines as delicate and fine as a Chinese fan unfurled at the 
corner of her eyes and bracketed her mouth in something between dimples 
and laugh lines. 

Her mouth was not smiling. The quizzical, half-ironic smirk she had worn
upon answering the door was melting away like an ice cream scoop 
running down the sides of the cone. She looked at me like I had punched 
her. I thrust out my plate of cookies in the universal sign of 
neighborly peace. 

"Welcome to the neighborhood," I said. 

She looked at me blankly. 

"Hi," I tried again. 

Her expression still looked shell shocked. Maybe she was from DC, were
your neighbors wanted to mug you, not bring you baked goods. 

"I made you cookies," I said, wondering if she could talk. I tried to
remember whether or not I remembered any sign language from college. I 
was fairly sure I could still finger spell... 

She finally accepted the outstretched cookies, murmured a subdued 'thank
you'. I thought she was weird. 

She came to my house the next day, my good china plate tucked under her
left arm like a football. She was like an entirely different person. 
She apologized for being such an idiot the other day; she had been 
having sinus trouble and was half-comatose from a Benadryl overdose. 
She smiled, she laughed. She complimented me on my cookies. Her nose 
crinkled at the bridge when she thought I'd said something funny. Her 
eyes were mostly blue that day, bright and inquisitive. 

She still looked out of place. She had a little gold hoop in her right
eyebrow and I knew at least one tattoo, hidden today by the sleeves of 
her white knit polo shirt. Her jeans were faded and comfortably fitted, 
rolled inexplicably halfway up her calf. A white pua shell necklace 
encircled her neck, a brown beaded anklet rested just above her right 
foot, and three oblong green and black marbled beads were threaded 
through a black leather thong to make up her bracelet. She looked like 
one of those eternally young people who can get away with dressing like 
a teenager even when they are thirty. 

She was thirty-two and she came back the next day. 

There were a lot of next days. 

Richard did not like her. There was something about the way her mouth
curled up naturally into those knowing smirks that grated on him, so 
eventually I started going over to her house and she stopped coming to 
mine. Hers was bare, compared to mine. A cheap Ikea couch, a cheaper 
kitchen table, a mattress on the floor. It was also a hundred times 
more vivid. 

She painted. 

Canvasses peppered her walls: fairy landscapes, craggy glaciers, colors
and forms swirling and merging to crash together into a kaleidoscope 
world that leapt at you in a frenzy a hundred times more compelling 
than the best art gallery showing. 

Her moods were like her paintings, as sharp and unpredictable as a
roller coaster, dipping and swelling from intense passion to whimsical 
indifference. I had forgotten that side dishes existed outside of white 
rice and mashed potatoes; she ordered Thai food and laughed when I 
fried a good many taste buds in one incautious bite. 

Sometimes the way she watched me was almost hungry. 

Richard still watched ESPN. 

One day, in a fit of productivity, Richard painted the garage. 

One day she painted me. 

I knew she was going to do it. She told me...cajoled me, begged me,
pleaded with me, actually. When she got like that she was unstoppable, 
I knew that already. How else do you explain the rollerblading? 

I wore something pretty that day. I brushed my hair with special care. I
brushed my teeth with whitening paste, as if one use would make a 
difference. I brushed them again in a fit of optimism. 

She pulled a blanket over her canvass when the light began to fade. She
did that everyday until the picture was done. She finally showed it to 
me. I was thunderstruck. 

I was also naked. 

I wasn't sure what I had expected. I did not expect to find myself
painted in bold, sensual lines. I stood in unselfconscious abandon in a 
rainstorm, welcoming the rain like a lover. It cascaded over my body in 
pearly beads and nearly translucent rivulets. 

I was curving and smooth and ripe and sexual and she had gotten the
color of my nipples exactly right. 

And that was my new awareness. 

It added a new dimension to everything. It was my new secret. The way
she saw me, the mirror she had held up to my face. I was not Richard's 
wife, Cruz's mother, a member of the PTA or the soccer mom with the 
grass-stains in the carpet mats of her Chevy Astro. I discovered my 
sexuality and freedom and found someone who liked Hemmingway and could 
discuss James Joyce and could stand aroused and naked in the rain. 

One night I put curry, chili paste and celery into Cruz's white rice. It
bit at my tongue, nipping at it like the sharp, urgent teeth of a 
lover. It was not Cruz's rice anymore; it was mine. Best of all, Asian 
kids are supposed to like hot food. I took perverse satisfaction in 
watching him try to maintain a stoic expression as he ate, and it took 
Herculean effort to refrain from snickering every time he gulped at his 
milk. 

One night I took a bubble bath. I touched myself with slow languid
hands; let soap slick fingers glide over my nipples until they were 
aching and peaked; slid my other hand between my legs. I was wet and 
slippery and my fingers moved smoothly over swollen lips and slipped 
into frothy depths and circled the place where my flesh strained and 
quivered until I arched and whimpered and shuddered into an orgasm so 
intense I convulsed and sat panting, bent over at the waist, feeling 
the rapid throb of my heartbeat in places a good deal below my chest. 

One night Richard began touching me. I let him, because it's what we
did, the way things worked, and it seemed only fair. I pretended he was 
the rain. He came. It was like hot Champaign erupting inside of me, 
jettisoning a million, tiny, impotent little bubbles. That night my 
body did not bother trying to go with him. My biological imperative had 
finally realized the truth...he was fixed. 

The next day I went over to her house. We ate cheese and French bread
and apples and drank a heady, tart white wine on the floor while 
watching one of her sharply unfocused artsy movies. She watched me suck 
an errant drop of wine off my fingers after pouring myself another 
glass; her gaze was funny—hungry and maybe a little angry. 

I realized that I was wet, and that was the second mirror she held up
for me to see myself in. 

Miles and miles of perfect skin I swear I do I fit right in My love
burns through everything I cannot breathe Miles and miles of perfect 
sin I swear I do I fit right in I fit right in your perfect skin I 
cannot breathe 

The music was wild and swirling, crescendo after crescendo building and
tumbling down. My head swam with it and I had the oddest 
sensation...like maybe my blood was boiling in the cauldron mix of 
ecstasy and enraged pain and guilt pouring out of the speakers. I shook 
my head and felt my entire body follow it's dizzy arc. I squinted one 
eye and tried to judge how much damage we'd done to the tequila bottle 
on the floor in front of her stereo. I hoped I was merely seeing 
triplicate, because if we'd really drained three bottles of Jose Cuervo 
down to barely a fourth remaining, we were in trouble. 

When three of her managed to get to their feet in a drunken lurch, I
realized that we were probably safe. When she held out three hands in 
silent invitation to help me up and I took my best guess and flung 
three of my own hands at one of them in acceptance, I was fairly 
certain of it. We made our way to her back porch with interspersed 
assistance from the walls and her refrigerator. It was the first time I 
wished she had more furniture. Her cat, Bean, looked at us with 
implacable feline dislike from the porch railing when we stumbled out; 
only a cat can turn the act of grooming into a gesture of such immense 
disdain. 

She pulled a package of somewhat crushed cigarettes out of her back
pocket, the effort almost knocking her over. The hot ashy taste burned 
and coiled its way down my throat; I coughed. She watched me while she 
smoked and her expression was sober with speculation. I looked away 
from her suddenly green cat eyes and took a deep breath, hoping to 
maybe sober up a little. I smelled rain and concrete and suddenly 
noticed that I was hearing the sharp stab of raindrops against her 
porch roof. 

I was drunk enough to know exactly what I was doing. I ran out into her
yard and stood with my arms open wide, embracing the secret lover she 
had painted for me. I heard her hiss of breath halfway out into the 
yard. It sounded like Bean, sharp and feral. 

It was summer; my t-shirt was soaked, my hair plastered back from my
uplifted face. I knew when she joined me; her body burned with a heat I 
could feel several feet away. I looked over my shoulder at her. The 
rain may have been my secret lover, but she was like a part of it...the 
flame of her hair rolled back from her forehead and into the black of 
her tank top like lava from an erupting volcano flowing into the sea. A 
child of storm, fire and water. If hot geysers of steam had hissed up 
off of her, I wouldn't have been surprised. She looked at me and 
smiled, a fiercely joyful baring of teeth. When she held out her hand 
for me again, I took it, laughing, and let her lead me back into the 
house. 

I felt giddy, high but not clumsy. I didn't want to lose that so I
dropped to my knees and took a long swallow from the bottle. The rim 
was still salty and the lime I bit into was tart and bitter. I did not 
question her when she dropped to her knees beside me, not even when I 
saw the look on her face. She dipped her head for a drink. Her lips 
closed around my nipple, through my shirt, and she began to suck out 
every drop of moisture in long, hard pulls of her lips and tongue. I 
gasped, arched into her, dug my fingers into her hair and pulled her 
closer. When her teeth scraped over it, I cried out. When she began to 
worry at the nipple with her teeth between sucking, I would have done 
anything to make her not stop. My heart was slamming like a racquetball 
against the wall of my ribs and if she had been more gentle in her 
caresses, they would have been drowned out by it's pounding. 

Her tongue was smaller and more agile than Richards. It was a ridiculous
thought, but when she kissed me, it was the first thing to come to 
mind. Her mouth was sharp with the taste of limes also—a lime flavored 
lip-lock—they were better than lemons. Lemons could be compromised into 
lemonade. Limes were prickly and unyielding...like old men and dogs. I 
kissed her back and admitted right there that I had been thinking about 
it for a long time now. 

Our attempts to undress each other were as hurried and uncoordinated as
horny teenagers in a Buick at prom. I think. I had not lost my 
virginity at prom; I had lost it to Bill, my first college boy romance, 
after seeing Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom at the Cineplex. In a 
way, I suppose this was losing my virginity too. For a moment I was 
alarmed by the thought that I had forgotten condoms. Then I looked at 
her, full lips parted in a heavy, rhythmic breathing pattern, hazel 
eyes dark with arousal, and I felt her pressed against me, all firm 
muscle and hard curves and soft breasts and skin, tiny and as 
piano-wire tense and wiry as a cat. 

Her ceiling was speckled with a horrible acoustic that looked like
cottage cheese spread over it in liberal clumps and her mouth drew at 
my neck with vamperic intensity. I knew I'd have a hickey; I hadn't had 
a hickey in eight years. I wondered where my brain had gotten off too, 
because surely sex on the floor after too much tequila with a woman who 
lived next door while Richard and his buddies were on their fishing 
trip and Cruz stayed the night at his cousin Rob's house was a bad 
idea. It had to rank right up there in the top three things I shouldn't 
do...right after mainlining heroin. 

The thing was, her skin was burning into mine like a small portable
furnace and her mouth was hot and wet, leaving cool snail trails down 
my skin and sharp, pleasurable pains where she nipped at me, and her 
hands skimmed over me with the dexterity and smoothly coordinated 
movements she afforded her paint brushes and canvasses and I wondered 
if this could be another painting: her and I, sticky with tequila and 
lust, on the floor, making alternative romance novel love. Her mouth 
was on my side, sucking on the place my waist curved into hip, then 
over, in humid, open-mouthed kisses. I shook like cafeteria jell-o 
squares when she tongued my navel, wondered what I was supposed to do. 
I knew where she was going...but did I simply open my legs? Was there 
some sort of protocol for this sort of thing? Richard and I had long 
since moved past oral sex, him sixteen years ago, me after Cruz turned 
seven and I became a MOM. Moms don't suck cock. 

I tried not to jerk when she speared her tongue inside me. I bit off a
groan when she rubbed her tongue up and over me and back down, 
scrubbing it over my entrance. She gripped my hips in her hands and 
tugged on me...hard. So I gave into her and let myself be the woman in 
her picture. I moaned when she sucked on me and cried out her name when 
she stuffed her fingers up inside me like I was a Thanksgiving turkey. 
I couldn't focus very well on what she was doing. I kept expecting 
Richard's well-rehearsed movements and it felt like being thrown 
suddenly onstage with an actor who likes improvisation; my body kept 
missing its cues. I didn't care. When I did come, it was in volcanic 
proportions that had me shaking and shuddering like an epileptic in a 
seizure. 

I felt clumsy when I tried to touch her back. Her body felt odd under my
fingers. I had almost forgotten that sometimes you touch people when 
you make love, you do not merely lay on your back like a beached whale, 
too crushed by sudden gravity to do more than flop sporadically and 
thrash your tail in hope when the waves break against your side. My 
fingers floundered over her body in a drunken weave that suggested not 
driving tonight would be a good idea. The allure of her body's roads 
and paths beckoned me on anyway. 

Her bones were sharp under my fingers, the meat of her firm but not
covering them quite enough. Nothing about her was thick enough to be a 
man. Her breasts were soft, and her nipples were not the useless 
kernels of a man. She demanded more of me with the tenses lines of her 
body and when I put my fingers inside her she was bubbling hot, 
clamping around them like a swallowing throat. Her skin tasted like the 
sea and between her legs was a taste like oysters or blood, thick and 
salty and slick. I fit inside her and on top of her and beside her and 
I couldn't breathe and I didn't think. She cried out sharply, the arch 
of her body when she came like the sweeping lines of a swan. And I 
loved her. 

Give me a reason to be beautiful So sick in body so sick in soul I'll
give you my body, just sell me your soul And everything I am will be 
bought and sold And everything I am will turn hard and cold 

I sat in the perfect silence of her living room, and she painted me
again. 

We made love between applications of paint. She smeared tribal markings
in crimson on my stomach and blue on my back. I traced the snake eating 
its tail around her bicep. "Oroborous," she told me, "The wheel of 
time. Eternity." The circuit our mouths formed when fused together felt 
a lot like that. 

Every afternoon she drew the blanket over her painting and that was the
signal for me to traverse the landscape of her backyard over into the 
winter brown prairie territories of my own. Richard still disappeared 
into the black hole of ESPN and NASCAR, and Cruz still obsessed over 
rice and how high he could spike his weirdly cut, blond tipped hair. I 
could barely see them anymore; they slipped in and out of my reality 
like errant Star Trek characters. 

One night Richard found a Playboy instead of math homework in Cruz's
backpack. He showed it to me and all I could think was that the 
plastically arranged woman had nice breasts. I had the oddest secret 
thrill. I liked breasts and we decided to ground Cruz. 

One night Richard began to touch me. I rolled over and got a headache. I
did not have a headache the next day when I crossed the boundary of the 
fence-line and we went rollerblading, nor did I have one when she threw 
me onto her mattress and showed me her more than passable Hoover 
impression. 

One day she did not draw a blanket over the painting, but motioned me to
her side in front of the easel. I looked at myself in the mirror of her 
canvass. I was in the sun and smiling and beautiful, and maybe my hair 
was a little too dark. I kissed her and smiled like the painting; she 
looked at me with the funny, hungry look that never seemed to go away. 

She fucked me hard and fast in the late afternoon, even though Richard
would be home soon. I had to walk home sore, with sticky thighs, and I 
didn't care. I thought about the picture and made cooked carrots for 
dinner, instead of peas or corn. My sweater showed cleavage and I 
walked into the nowhere of the living room with a sway in my hips that 
had been missing every since I became a wife and didn't need to be 
alluring anymore. 

Richard looked at me and smiled; I smiled back, as empty-hollow sweet as
a chocolate Easter bunny. We rolled our eyes together at the thumping 
base and posturing male singing voices coming out of the boombox in 
Cruz's bedroom. 

"You think he'll ever grow out of it?" Richard asked with a resigned
amusement. 

I shrugged. "You never see adults listening to that crap...but then, I
thought he'd be over the rice by now." 

Richard laughed, one of his real ones. For a moment I remembered why I'd
married him. Then a roar from the crowd bunched into the box of ESPN 
sucked him back into the black hole of the television, leaving a lump 
of man-flesh sitting in my good recliner from LaZBoy. 

I went over early the next morning, right after Richard left for work,
leaving a pile of laundry on the floor of the bathroom like a range of 
small mountains, peaking in smelly gym sock summits. She was still in 
the shower, but the front door was open. I explored the bookcase in the 
corner, listening to the shower running...white noise. 

She read a lot. She had one photo album. I touched it and thought about
pictures of butt-naked redheaded toddlers and first Christmases. I 
pulled it down and opened it. There she was, tiny and wrinkled and 
sucking on her fist, probably hours after being born. There she was 
again, dressed in frilly lace, taking first tentative steps alongside a 
couch, chubby fingers clutching the edge of the cushion in a death 
grip. She smiled from another picture, tongue poking out of the space 
left by the defection of her two front teeth. She stood in a frothy 
blue prom dress sporting a corsage the size of your average table 
centerpiece, on the arm of her pimple-faced date. She stood next to me 
under a tree, laughing and flushed with new love. I was younger and had 
darker hair; we had never taken a picture together. 

A block of ice took up residence in the Igloo cooler of my stomach. 

Hey baby, take it all the way down Hey baby, taste me anyway You were
born We'll never know... And fading like a rose 

She didn't bother to deny it. I looked just like her ex-lover. Her lover
had died in a car accident exactly nine months ago. She kissed me and I 
tasted the ashes of ghosts on her tongue. She fucked me hard and fast, 
the way she did it when I now realized she didn't want to see me. I lay 
on top of her and touched her back, her skin cold against me. She was 
still sticky and hot inside, like an apple turnover straight from the 
oven. 

Wet red hair and turbulent green eyes and an elfish mouth open on gasps
that had nothing to do with me. I wanted to open her up and get inside 
her, drown myself in the sharp jagged reef of her skeleton and sink 
into the heat of her blood and the pulse of her organs and have her 
feel me inside her the way she had felt this other woman. I wondered if 
those kinds of thoughts were what got serial killers started. I 
wondered why I still loved her. 

One night I made white rice and peas drowning in their buttery-yellow
soup and I still didn't feel normal. 

Love hates you I live my life in ruins for you And for all your secrets
kept I squashed the blossom and the blossom is dead 

Her need tasted like a too-dry gin in my mouth—floral and
complex—sucking up all my moisture and breath. The mindless roar of a 
football game blasted from the living room; I should not be doing this. 
I didn't listen to me, instead allowed her to thrust her tongue into my 
mouth, opening for her because that's what I always did, and because it 
seemed only fair. I knew what day it was, she had told me. Her eyes 
were clamped shut, but I could see the microwave clock over her 
shoulder. 6:45 pm, October 18th. A year ago her lover had been ripped 
to shreds by a savagely jagged windshield and crushed by several tons 
of merciless steel. The truck driver had tried to pull her out to give 
her CPR; she didn't look like she was breathing after the battering ram 
of his 18wheeler. He hadn't meant to tear her throat open on the spiked 
glass of the windshield. Hadn't realized that one piece was sticking up 
like that. 

Her kiss was acidic. It burned, eating away at me. I took her eggshell
skull in my hands and kissed her back, just as fiercely. I wondered if 
I were to crush it in my palms like a walnut, would I be able to pull 
out the meat of another woman's memory? I wondered why I still loved 
her and when love had become as sharp and slicing as a razor blade. 

I thought about cookies, and when I had lost my white chocolate and
macadamia nut twist. I no longer believed in love as soft and delicate 
as a rose blossom. I no longer believed in romance novels, the Lady 
Gwendolyn St. Eire, or her pirate. St. Eire had been raped and her 
pirate probably had a small dick. 

And they say in the end You'll get bitter just like them And they steal
your heart away When the fire goes out you better Learn to fake It's 
better to rise than fade away... 

Love was something that eventually was bleached away, any colors it left
behind ugly and leached of life. The kind of love that did not go away 
was the kind that fucked you on a bed of broken glass, digging into 
your skin, a buckshot spray of punctures and slashes. 

One day she began painting me again. We made love between applications
of paint. I wondered if I had remembered to put the towels in the dryer 
before I came over. I thought about fixing steaks in Martha Stewart's 
new marinade when I went home. 

One day she showed me the painting. I was wrapped in the boughs of a
fairy's fern, smiling in the cool of a forest glade. My hair was still 
too dark. I smiled like the picture and kissed her back. 

She made love to me, soft and slow, like maybe she didn't mind seeing me
that day. I wondered when her magic had turned into the sort of 
purified pain one sees on Christ's face in crucifixion depictions; A 
flame haired Jesus writhing in redemptive agony under my mouth. 

One day I didn't cross the tundra of my backyard into her fairy
backdrop...one day I didn't go back. 

Hey you were right Named a star for your eyes Did you freeze did you
weep Turn to gold, baby sleep 

One night Richard smelled like his secretaries perfume. One night Cruz
smelled like pot. I made chicken and rice and peas and still did not 
feel normal. 

Hey honey mine I was there all the time And I weep at your feet And it
rains and rains 

One day she brought me a painting. I was wrapped in a cloak of night,
studded with stars. My hair was the right color. 

I loved her. I didn't believe her. I sent her home. 


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