Farethee well Casa McReynolds, h'llo Amy....

It is goodbye to Down Circle. It is faretheewell to Casa McReynolds. It is sayonara to the house where we used to drop water bombs out the window. The house where I used to spy on Patrick’s older sister when she was worshiping the sun face down and topless in the back yard. The house where every where the summer of 1988 I met Patrick’s younger sibling Allan while visiting Shannon Moore on Downs Circle and saw the wooden apparatus passing for wooden rungs to a tree house in his front yard to which his mom, told her eldest male progeny to go out side and tell that stranger to get out of the tree house let he fall down and break his neck and his parents sue us for all we are worth, Patrick, coming, myself asking him if he made this and then telling him that this is really cool.

Normally we have the sleepover every year around Pat’s birthday the last week of February. We rent movies and play Nintendo nonstop. We e each get a five dollar large pizza from little Cesar and role-play for six hours straight. Normally I ride my bike home to do my paper route and come back and them, at six-thirty, we go into the woods and have a water gun fight. Some years if its too cold to go into the woods we adjourn to Patrick’s basement and have a water gun war in the dark until pap McReynolds opens the door and yells down that its seriously time to start thinking about sleep, guys.

 It is the final party. Unlike the week before when I went to the movies with Reane it is nowhere near as cold. I walk over with Tim. I told my dad that I will be outside our house at 4:30 counting papers. Dad has been carping on Patrick ever since he caught him smoking outside our house last February.  Father thinks that Patrick is a bad influence even though he is my closest friend. Tim is taking the reigns for the campaign. We are dropping dice. Alluding to a few weeks back hale is saying that its nice that  Renae isn’t around.Patrick says dude, I’m going to Limestone, the high school with all the white girls, I’m totally be going to stat hitting all that shit.

I hold up my picture of Renae Holiday for Patrick. When he asks dude, you don’t mind if I like borrow this for a few days I bark at him and tell him no and then yes, I do. 

“Shit man, she is hot as fuck. Shit bro. Fuck.”

We are gaming in Tim’s campaign,. It is a farewell to Down’s circle even though Patrick is not planning on moving until sometime in in either December or early January.  Patrick says dude again. As has been the norm every year everyone gives me their money and Hale and myself go with Mr. McReynolds and take the cherry coated ’86 Honda that almost always needs a jump to Little Cesar's, not far from where Patrick 12 speed blew its second flat of the day last summer en route back form the Mall, Little Cesar's has PIZZA PIZAZA five dollars large and its not usual for myself to get two and for  us to order 15 single topping pizzas while gaming upstairs in Patrick’s room.   

 

 

Hale seems excited that Patrick is going to be joining him at Limestone but keeps on adding that its just not all that its cracked up to be. Tim is apathetic and spends more attention chomping into triangular slices of pizza that looks like chasse and cardboard than he does consoling Patrick who is leaving.

“I was really hoping that you’d bring over some chick mans. I mean, if all the girls at Limestone are as hot as Renae.”

I can call her man. I mean. We normally call each other at this time anyway. She knows I’m partying with you. I think she’s just hanging out with some girlfriends watching videos tonight.

Patrick adds, yeah, they’re probably slathering each other with lotion and having pillow fights in their little panties. Tim takes a chomp of his cheese pepperoni and comment that Pat is demented. I pick up the phone. When I dial I notice  that Patrick is going into the bathroom in the part of the  attic that used to be his sister Chris room and smoking a cigarette.

 

“Patrick!!”

Tim says its Patrick’s future cancer let him deal with it.

I dial the number I have memorize on the rotary phone of my heart. Renae picks up on the first ring. I ask how my little mermaid is doing. Hale takes his fore finger and places it in his mouth as if he is gaping to vomit.

"Yeah, I’m over here at Pats. It’s his farewell party. We’re not really doing much. Just sort of hanging out.”

 I tell Renae that I wish I was with her. She says that every night she goes to bed she pictures me kissing her forehead.

“How’s your night going. How’s Laura and Kristie? You crazy girls having fun?”

“Actually it’s just myself and Amy. Laura is sick and Tim and Kristie got into a big fight and then decided to go to a Rivermen game to work it out.”

 I want to ask Renae what is up with you Limestone kids and hockey.

 “Anyway, its just myself and Amy. Were just sort of chilling.” From behind me Patrick is ashing out his smoke in the toilet. He is bobbing several times.  Hale makes a comment that he wishes Von Behren  should just go ahead and call dawn because he always likes her which aggravates Patrick to no end and coerced him to sound like he is in the turrets ward.

 

“Hey, Amy there, put her on. She would totally dig my friend Pat.”

 

  I hand him the phone. Patrick goes into his sisters bathroom and smokes another cigarette.  He is taking several puffs. Tim has his hand over his Pizza like he is guarding it. I tell Patrick not to be long. Patrick puts his hand over the lower hemisphere of the phone to suck it up sailo

I go outside. I hang out with Hale.

“I wish I was going to Limestone with you. Patrick was really all I had at manual. It’s really gonna be hard when he leaves.”

Hale tells me again that its not all that.

“But I mean, my father went there. All my cousins go there. Both you and David best are there and now Patrick. Hell, the woman I’m dating goes there. I just think if I went there I would feel as if I somehow belonged.”

Hale states again that its not at all as it is cracked up to be.

 “Besides, I see your friend Renae all the time in the hallway. She never says hi to me. It’s like I’m not even alive.”

Hale then asks me if I ever hear from my old friend Dawn.

 

                                                        

 

Batman Returns just came out on VHS and we are watching it even though I keenly remember that Dawn Michelle labeled it insipid last summer when it came out. I go upstairs. Patrick is still on the phone. He is laughing uncontrollably. He makes some sort of joke involving and alien and a dildo. When I ask Patrick who he is talking to he looks back and says, Amy.

 

“You’ve been talking to her for fifteen minutes, bro, think I could give my girlfriend a goodnight kiss.

 

Past says no,. He says that it is his party. He says go downstairs and when he is off the phone with Amy he will call me back up and I can say goodnight.

I hammer into the pizza. For some reason none of us feel like role-playing. Mrs. Mcreynolds seems to monopolize the entire night talking with Hale about how he likes Limestone. She mentions Aron Rothman teasing Patrick as well as Mrs. Peabody math class.

 Three hours later Patrick is still on the phone with Amy.

"Patrick just give me the phone so I can say goodnight to Renae."

 Patrick holds up one finger and then begins to laugh.

 

“Its  one o’clock in the morning. Amy says that your girl just crashed for the night.”

I am pissed. I grab the phone from Pat.

"Amy hey, where’s Renae.”

 

“Your princess is asleep. You have to awaken her with a kiss.”

 I hand back the phone to Pat with my hand cupped over the receiver informing Pat that bro, you have guests and you are moving. This is the last time we will have a chance to party at casa Mcreynolds. “ Patrick looks back at me disgruntled and says fine, just fuck things up with me and the woman of my dreams.

 

“Maybe you can get her number and call her back tomorrow. Hale and Tim are bored downstairs.”

 

Pat says fine. He says give him five minutes so he can say goodnight.  

 I clamber downstairs. An hour later Patrick comes down. Tim is Aggrieved. Hale is asleep sounding like a vacuum cleaner with a broken ban.

 

"Dude man, I’m fucking smitten. I think I’m in love.”


 

The next night I contact Dawn again. She is telling me about music. She says that try as she may she can’t get enough of the Singles Soundtrack, esp. Alice in Chains. She refers to their lead singer as a poet. She says that her parents and her have come to an agreement. That on school nights she is to be home at 11 pm no matter what and on weekend she can stay out as late as she likes as long as she calls before ten and lets her parents no where she is at.

“Also they told me that if I come home drunk again I am out on my own.”

 I tell her that that sounds like a pretty nifty incentive to go on the wagon. I use the word nifty. dawn says that she is thankful that her parents are talking to her like an adult and that they were able to rectify the situation.

 She uses the word rectify.

When Dawn inquires I tell her that, unlike last summer at CCT, no one calls me Harry Connick Jr or says that I look like that kid off of Blossom.

“It sounds like you feel in exiled at your institution of learning?”

I ask Dawn what? 

It sounds like you feel all alone all the time.

 

 

                                          ***

“What?” I take a double-look.

 

“We’re moving. I’ll be going to Limestone in a couple of weeks. My parents found a really cool place in Norwood. Its kind of nestled in the woods.”

 I want to tell Patrick that he can’t leave. That we are in this together. That even though my dad seems to have a sort of vendetta against Patrick because he smokes he can’t abandon me. Not now.

 "Pat man you are my best friend. I mean…."

Patrick cuts me off. He tells me that there are hotter girls at Limestone.

 “There’s more white girls. Plus there are no gangs. Plus Dad says the neighborhood ain’t just what it used to be. It’s getting more ghettoey.”

“Patrick!” I am holding my teal lunch tray.

“But I mean, we've owned West Peoria these last couple of years. What about all the afternoon we just walked around doing nothing but role-playing, riding our bikes, lounging in  the Nuclear woods. We have owned this town.”

 

Patrick tells me besides, I’ll still have Tim.

‘Tim is graduating in six months. You’ll be with Hale It’s like..."

Patrick sets his milk down hard.

“Listen My mom doesn’t like Manual She says it isn’t safe here. It was  safe a couple of years ago when Chris and Amy were going here but now things have changed. It’s dangerous. Mom doesn’t want Allan or Sarah going to a school like this.”

But don’t you like it here?"

 

“I’m teased relentlessly in every class. It’s no different than Christ Lutheran. People are cunts here.”

 

I tell Patrick not to say that word.

 

"Cunts cunts cunts. People are cunts here. Plus it seems like half the girls who are Junior plus are waddling around pregnant and the other half seem to have nothing but a maxi-pad lodged between the lobes of their ears.

 

I nod.

 

“Besides I’ll be with Hale.”

I shoot Patrick a look like great, reference my other best friend.

 

“Also don’t you have a girlfriend that goes to Limestone?”

I remind Patrick that her name is Renae.  Patrick says that he’s heard she’s a little hottie. I ask her when he saw her. He says that she sounds like a hottie from how I talk about her.

Patrick has already dumped me for algebra and now he is leaving me all alone for the remainder of high school.  Behind me I can hear trays being overturned and thumped into the garbage cans before delivered into the side window of the kitchen to me washed, utensils popping in buckets of suds like rain in spring. 

I am losing my closest friend and brother.

 

I still can’t even walk without limping and now I am losing my closet friend.

 

“Promise me one thing. “

 

“What’s that?"

 

“Before you leave we have one final farewell to Casa McReynolds. One final cheer to your Downs Circle abode. 

 

“Dude,”Patrick retorts, “Of course.”

 

 

                                                                    ***

 

Dawn Michelle doesn’t ask me too many questions but when she does it seems like she is genuinely concerned about my state of being.

 

“So do you like Manual?”

She  has never judged me for going to school in the Southside. I don’t know what to tell her. I want to tell her that I felt like a complete failure my first cross-country season. I want to tell her that my brother Patrick just announced the other day that he is transferring to Limestone until I remember that dawn and Patrick got into it at Subway last summer, Dawn, referencing  Patrick as a womanizer and a misogynist.

We talk about movie. She tells me that she saw Malcolm X and went crazy over it. She tells me that she can’t wait to see Hoffa I a couple of weeks. She says fuck Home Alone 2 and Aladdin. She says that she has seen Braham Strokers Dracula three times and that went weeks listening to only the Singes Soundtrack and Dracula Soundtrack.

 Dawn Michelle defines the movie as being an opera, although most critiques just focus on the grotesque nature of the theme.

“It’s a love story. The movie is about a timeless passion. It’s a movie where the heart is notarized and lives on forever.”

“I saw the Annie Lennox video for it the other night…”

Dawn interjects asking me isn’t it beautiful at how the end she becomes the Vampire. How her longing transforms her. How love makes her scene and changes her regardless of the folds and foibles of the flesh.

 

“It’s a beautiful." I tell her, very gently thinking about the blush and time signature of her porcelain smile.

"It is a very beautiful song indeed."

 

Your father is turning 45. Grandma has everyone over and cooks up a roast. She makes her potatoes which she whipps (best potatoes you will ever have) doused with gravy so thick it could some unknown petrol-distillate. Father is 45 years old. You are fifteen. On his birthday your grandmother prays thanking the Lord for granting her first born another year of life. When your father turned 40 you were all of ten years of age.  Your mother planned a 40^th surprise party for him when Andy Moore came over to help him with the attic wiring in your (often falling apart) domestic abode and your mom had your sister Beth play her cello while, astonishingly, all of your father’s friends traipsed inside on tip-toes holding a birthday cake and festooning the living room with streamers all the while your mother clapped in rote ho-down fashion  to your sisters variation of Twinkle-twinkle littler Star and when your father came down everyone yelled surprised and he was florid-cheeked and blushing even though he has a beard and the next thing you know the three progenies were being whisked away to Grandmothers house to sleep over while your parents partied with non-alcoholic beard and played charades and had Christian fellowship and laughed.

Your girlfriend lives less than five minutes away by car. You are never able to spend the night at Grandma’s because of your paper route in the morning, the exception being Christmas eve, since the STAR is closed the next day, so after church the last three years you have christened the tradition of crashing at Grandma’s after the midnight service at Christ Lutheran.

The Gideon bible is lodged in your front pocket. You think about Christ Lutheran. Your penis brushes against it whenever you get aroused.

It is moss-colored maxipad that tames you, that reminds you the blood Christ shed for you, that perennially notes that entertaining thoughts of entering the naked upside-down pyramidal shape thighs of girlfriend you are currently seeing is nothing short of a sin. Of what happen last summer when your body lost control with Tina and your limbs locked and dry humped in your underwear in her pool as Celeste and the cool Blackman copulated behind you was a sin. That how you can’t stop looking at the hovering silhouettes of the college girls next door through the blinds as they seemingly float from room to room is nothing short of a sin.

You keep the Gideon bible in your front pocket of your size 28  jeans at all times.

You keep the picture of Renae Holiday in the other, with your wallet.

Sometimes you look at the picture of Renae and swear she is naked. Sometimes is looks like she is waiting just for you to come and take her someplace away.

I tell her that I really had a good time.

“I miss kissing you.” I tell Renae.

Renae says that she can’t remember anything about the movie.

“Laura was kind of upset with our blatant display of public affection.”

She is blushing on the other side of the phone.

I gotta go to my grandma’s house . It’s my father’s birthday tonight.”

Only later do I realize that Renae’s cool father was my father’s age when I was six years old.

“I’m gonna take a shower.” Renae says.

“I always shower and think about you after we get off the phone.”

An hour later lights are flecked on. Dad already has the Sunday papers counted on the table on our front porch.

While I am waking up Dad was usually page through the first two sections.

There still is no announcement for the Young Columbus contest this year.

I place the papers in my Journal Star bag.  I am walking down the opposite side of the street.  I am trying not to reflect on everything I witnessed last night. I am trying to wonder why the creature next door was communicating with her body via the tips of her fingers.

I wonder if Dawn really wanted to see me again or if she just needed someone to speak with.

Two hours later I am in church. I am carrying the Cross, holding it in front of the congregation as the choir marches in. I am seated in the front of the church with the pastors. Every time I look out in the pews I see naked flesh of the college girls next door. Every time I open the bible the white pages look just like the unclothed legs of the girl I couldn’t take my eyes off of, spying at her through the advent calendar square of my bedroom window last night.

I need to speak with Renae.

                                  

After the service I get a cup of cheap Sunday School coffee in the ginat Sunday School urn at the back of the Sunday School kitchen. I Walk into the Listerine colored bathroom. Including the instant coffee I made for myself this morning before I left for church this is my sixth cup in the last two hours.

While I am urinating Egg Plant Elmore comes behind me.

I have no clue why the only time Eggplant Elmore feels c compelled to speak with me is when I am splayed legged over the porcelain urinal.

“I heard you went out with reane Friday night.”

“What I say?”

“I heard you guys went out and saw Sister Act,. I heard all you guys did was just make out and French kiss the entire time.”

“Elmore I can’t pee when you are directly behind me. You know that.”

Eggplant Elmore steps back like he is doo-see-doing in square dance.

I give me unit a shake.

“How did you hear that?”

Egpplant Elmore starts to talk about genealogy.

“Apparently Laura called Sarah Huff who called Lonnie who spoke with David yesterday at Brass during Madrigal p[practice and I overheard.”

I smile. I can’t help but think that I am  some sort of celebrity at the school I year to attend.

Dude, She’s my girlfriend. I’m like madly in love with her

Elmore has his legs pressed together. He looks like a little girl who needs to potty.

“Did you?”

”What?” I say, the sound of my zipper being pulled towards my navel sounds like an elongated fart.

“I mean, did you?”

I am washing my hands. The sound is in a plastic tube that looks like the translucent countenance of an alien.

I wonder how many of my friends have seen a girl naked. I wonder how many of my friends have seen a girl lick the interior of her fingers and then touch the center of her body while closing her eye, mumbling mantras with her lips that sounds like she is praying.

“I mean, how far did you go?”

Elmore she’s my girlfriend.

“ I mean did you?.”

Elmore is making sounds with his lips. He is nodding his head up and down. I reach for the paper tongue of the towel dispenser just as an usher walks through the door. I grab my Styrofoam cup of coffee and head out doors.

“Come on, lets go to Sunday school. Sunday School is ready to begin.”

.........

I speak with Dawn for three hours. She is telling me about Speech. She is talking about movies and music she is into. She tells me that she is trying to quit smoking. She tells me that she also drinks too much coffee. For three days, after her parents kicked her out, she lived in her station wagon under a bridge on Big Hollow Road.

I want to ask her if she’s gone out and gotten drunk and given any more blowjobs only I refrain.

She inquires about my life. I want to tell her about how lonely I feel inside Manual all the time. I tell her about my cross-country injury. I tell her about running every day and then experiencing pain and not being able to do the one thing I felt destined to achieve. I tell her about failure. I allude to the loneliness I feel inside Mrs. Peabody’s and Cool Joe Thomas’s classroom.

I tell her about Renae. I tell her about my first official girlfriend whose lips loafed above my chin all last night. 

“She’s in speech. She was in a meet this morning at Bradley.”

Dawn says she was there. As I describe her Dawn says that she thinks she knows who I am talking about.

 Yeah, really pretty girl. Blonde hair.  Forehead the size of an imax movie screen because when she was a little girl her mom always put her hair in a pony tail so tight that it altered the formation of her skull more or less.”

Dawn is quiet.  I wonder if I should meet her again. I wonder if we could go out and it would be almost like old times last summer when we seemed to have an infinite conversation.  Next door a light a switched on. The window is a yawn, an illuminated advent calendar.  There is movement. I can feel the body next door pause.  I have successfully managed to watch the college girl who is renting the house next door with several friends undress three times.  Every time the light flicks into cognizance I am inexplicably reeled into the direction of the window. My vision all but can abstain. I balance on the side of my bed and the desk my father got me from school with eh superheroesque Z in the center. I turn the light off. Sometimes I feel like a sniper. I wait for hours. I turn the music down. The lights are off. Often I will tell my parents that I am going to sleep an hour early because of my leg and I stay up my vision pasted to the white frame, the latitudinal slashes availing paragraphs of light, her body skirting back and forth. She is  the same girl I watched coming out of the bathroom a month ago, still zipping up the jigsaw of her jeans before she rattled her torso in front of the full length mirror for more than an hour dancing to the invisible tempo to music. I turn the lights off in my room and peer through the blinds, watching the skinny girl with her hail tied up in a knob on the top of her head continue to write.

 Dawn is talking about going to a Bill Clinton rally the night he won even though she was living in her car at the time.

 The girl shuffles back and forth in front of the window. Finally I see her. Again she is writing. She is wearing glasses. Her hair is spooled into a knob on the top of her head by what looks like chopsticks.  There are several books heaped on her bed. She is writing furiously. She is attacking the pages. Even from this position of unalloyed espial I can see that she is writing with intent.  I can see that she is tattooing the page. I still have Dawn on the phone.

At one o’clock in the morning I tell Dawn I need to go

She is writing. Again I am lost inside her thoughts. Again I can feel loops of her cursive sentences, I can feel myself being welded and stung into the diary in each sentence.  It is like she is frantically pressing some button to an palace located inside her only she is not raising her finger and the button keeps jamming.

She is wearing the same Sweat pants and sweat shirt she wore with the embroidered M in the center which I can only intuit are her pajamas and the next thing I know she has ripped off her side ponty tail and flipped off her glassed. In a whisper she is yanking her sweatpants down near her ankles. Her panties are manacled around the slightly cinnamon flavored prominent caps of her knees.

She is naked from the waist down. Her legs form what looks like a Gaudi cathedral or perhaps a flower.  She licks her  three middle fingers as if she is in a commercial. She then places her fingers in a flickering bouquet staccato between her loins. It looks like she is playing the harp or trying to reach certain clefs on a vicarious stringed instrument. Her eyelids are closed the entire time. She licks the opposite hand and begins to touch the opposite nipple. I am not certain exactly what I am seeing. The entirety of her physical body is tittering. Her legs are kicked out like a field goal post. She keeps touching the center of her body, her panties manacled around the protruding bone of her left ankle like a white flag cosigning hormonal capitulation to the feeling of unknown ecstasy entering her every solitary pore.  Somehow while she is touching herself I swear every time she bats her eyes it looks like Dawn Michelle. Her legs are spread apart. Everything below my navel is an erupting obelisk. I can’t move. I am paralyzed. Whatever she is doing to her body she is voluntarily taking myself with her.

She holds up one finger little light of mine style, licking it once. The finger then performs a kamikaze swan dive into the center of her loins.

Her finger goes in only a tenth of and inch at first but somehow her entire body snaps like a venus flytrap. She wields her finger out again, removing a sword from fairytale slab of granite before plowing it back between her things. She is biting her lip. It looks like the center of her eyes have taken an elevator through  her skull. She is fucking herself. She is p-laying her own body in a time-signature known only to her. She is performing arias and sonnets. The libretto of the lonely. She bites her lips before tittering uncontrollably. Her teeth gnashed into the side of her mouth, she is ready to release something in her limbs resemble and overturned chandelier and the next second her head is clanging against the mattress, her finger pressed in deeper, she is screaming, she is levitating, she is going to somewhere where only she can take herself.

She is setting herself free.

 Her entire body seems to kick into four different directions. She is breathing hard. She is sweating.  Sweat trickles off her forehead and off the drip of her nose in quarter notes and in tears. She has taken three finger and, in an almost Boy Scout pledge, is sucking on all three of them at once, as if it is a pitch harmonica for a cappella foursome. She is sweating. She won’t calm down. She is no longer touching herself. From my periphery it appears she is whimpering.

Then she turns. She is on all fours. Although the lights are off in my bedroom. Although I am still balancing on the side of my bed certain that the cast of my shadow is not visible She is looking at me. The jam of her own body drying around the inverted elevator button of her naval. She is looking at me reclining on elbows and kneecaps. Maybe she is just staring and her own reflection. It seems that she knows I have been watching her for the last three months. It seems that she knows I can’t help but somehow be magnetically reeled into the illuminated square of her bedroom window every night, hoping that she will wriggle out of her attire.

She is smiling. Perhaps she is seeing only her translucent reflection. She is smiling and as she gropes both her breasts giving them hard squeeze. She is feral. She is naked. She looks as if she needs to be caged and tamed.

It is like she is continually sticking her finger into a jamming elevator button, pressing the button until her moist dactyl as a whole is completely swallowed. She is sucking on three fingers. She is running the center of her body with her opposed hand as if it is maligned and bruised.

She  gets up. Sweat is on her body. I am half expecting her to slip back into the white panties but instead she kicks them off as if throwing a challenge flag at a football game. She then rises and stretches.

Her body is something brand new.

                                                   ***

“We saw it last night,” Dawn Michelle states again.

I tell her that I saw the video on late night cable. I tell her that the video was weird especially the end.

“Don’t you see it. That’s when she transforms into a Vampire. That’s when she become the one entity that she has somehow sworn to herself never to become.”

I have just spent last night making out with Renae Holiday.

“You don’t thin it’s beautiful?” Dawn Michelle queries again.

“Yes” I tell her looking down, with my glasses still off, “I think it is beautiful indeed

                                                      ***

 She walks up to her desk and sits down. She takes what looks like a razor. From my asked perspective it looks like she is either carving her initials into the desk with a separated blade of a razor or about ready to commit suicide. I remove my hand out from the center of my pants. For a moment I think I am watching her kill her self. For a moment I think she is going to strike south on the whites of her wrist. I think about how it is somehow my civic duty to call 9-11, To have a suicide prevention team arrive. To say I had just woken up in the middle of the night and heard scream and when I peered out my window there was what looked like blood everywhere in the window next door.

I then wonder if the cops will ask if I was spying on her. If I knew she was naked when before or after I noted the blood.

On her dresser she appears to be playing a piano, pressing the same key over and over. It then looks like she is dicing something. She holds up something to her nose and, with the finger that was previously inside her body, hushes close the opposing nostril. I am fifteen years of age. I know nothing about cocaine and narcotics except, according the DARE pledge I signed in 5^th grade, I would never use or associated anyone associated with the drug. From my periphery it looks like she has allergies.

She then goes back to her bed. She opens up her mattress like the lid to a coffin. She then unearths something that looks sort of like a track and field relay baton.

Again she looks in the window facing my direction. Again I wonder if she sees me surreptitiously peeking through the blinds.

Before I know it she is attacking herself, she is jousting her torso, she is lancing the tip of the baton below her naval. She is screaming out again. She is rocking herself. Her lips are moving. It’s pretty clear from ten feet away that she is stammering out someone’s name.

Then I hear it.

Through the rackety trails of the late November wind, I hear her screaming. I hear the phrase she is saying. She is screaming out the name of the Lord. She is uttering the name of the only monotheistic deity I have ever known.

I walk away, in  reverse from the gnawing blinds.

I get down on both knees and pray for forgiveness.

I pray so hard my eyes squeeze into tears.