Running Girl

“And the thug takes the girl over to New Jersey in the cab and kills her and rapes her and does all these terrible things to her in front of his prostitute girlfriend. The thug is so stupid, he uses her cell phone, and the cops trace it back to him.” — Bill O’Reilly

#1

Even walking two steps behind you there is still so much sidewalk and many eyes. Blue peacocks. “Don’t look at the stores,” you say. “They have cameras.” The video can capture what I see–the murdered girl riding between your shoulder blades, your thumbprints in her neck. Her white skirt and silver belt. Her red tears. Cold. That’s why you’re wearing sweatpants in ninety degrees. You’re ice. Because she is. You keep cracking your knuckles, the fig cookies smack, your tongue paddle mashing seeds and saliva. Since we left New Jersey you can’t seem to stop eating. Fruits, nuts, slugs. A dim sky hangs starless between buildings. Ticker tape Times Square. BODY OF MISSING NEW JERSEY GIRL FOUND IN DUMPSTER. News chases the lit up letters into the blank. Legs fishnetted, see-through girls walk by in bursts of perfume. Lilac. Rose. Diamond nose studs in the gray face of the night. You stink like homicide.

#2

“Wait!” I call out. “I need to go in here.” Before you can stop me I dart into Designer Perfumes. Rustling manes of fragrances rush at me. The stronger ones, the weaker. Others wait for me to go toward them. I smell like grilling sweat, like soy sauce and Clorox. Like a bird at the base of its quills. I smell like a dead girl. Not blood. There wasn’t any just those two red tears trickling from her eyes. I think I started my period. I crossed a line.

#3

Samba Heat. Jasmine. Peony. I spray it on my wrist skin. My underarms. I want to crawl into the bottle. Live inside pink glass. Water lily. Black Currant.

I can always visit the long ago. I spray on avatar roses, see the white throated woman back in my past. Her name was Cyndi. She let my father’s friends kiss her. “All of them are peacocks,” she said, “resting it on the ground.” Please stay, I thought, don’t go away. She leaned against the dresser. The perfume decanter was the prettiest thing in the room. She fingered the cloudy glass of the stopper ball where the scent left was tawny and dried. She touched it behind my ears. “You’re a sweet thing.” Then she hugged me. “I wish your da would let me take you home.” Cyndi’s long brown hair felt like feathers, soft and warm. I wanted the stopper ball. Perfume like crushed leaves held a precious sweetness of the tree. More Samba. Perfume makes me invisible. Lilies and mint. Nutmeg and musk. This one is cedar and gardenia. I spray all of them on. I make a mortuary.

#4

“You have to pay for that bottle,” the clerk says, stepping out from behind the elevated check-out. He pushes aside the perfume fog. He’s tall and Indian, handsome with black hair that looks too silky to be real. People are smaller when the cash register isn’t between you and them. But he holds himself like he’s the owner. “You pay, then get out.” He passes a hand over his rich black hair. Like black ice cream. What flavor would that be? I tell him I don’t have money. “You take your dirt. Go.” I see my eyes floating in the round mirror above the counter but where is my face?

#5

There I am on TV. Shoplifting Network. They’re all from Bangladesh in the delis, working twelve hour shifts, and young dark-eyed guys who I smile at and who always smile (shyly) back. No matter if Indians or Koreans own the store, they get Bangladeshis. They work, they keep on working. Fourteen, sixteen hours. Whatever it is that lies behind them, they keep saying “next,” their fingers quick on the register. Starving owls bring fish and frogs into the nest. Now you enter the store, stand out in your red sweats, red hoodie, sneakers brand new from Payless Shoes. You strut like a peacock in full array. Each eye, gold, green, purple. “How about a hand job from this girl for two six-packs of Heineken and a box of fig cookies? How about it, brother?” Now you badger him, wanting a sandwich too. Ham and cheese with oil and onions and a pickle on the side. Will you bind a wild bull fast with its ropes in the furrows? The counter boy freezes, the smile still on his lips. I smooth my blond hair. Now a couple sidles in, tall and dreadlocked. In uptown leather pants and claret-colored velvet vests. Ethiopian gazelles. I clutch fig cookies, counting out dimes. The nice-faced boy shakes his head. “No charge.” Then he says, “next,” and the gazelles step to the counter. Meals in the Ethiopia of long ago–the tongues of flamingos and the brains of peacocks. Outside on the street the heat presses down, breathes what it wants of us, and blows stale half air at our backs.

#6

“Pick up the pace,” you say. “Two more avenues to Port Authority. We’re going to find a hotel in East Harlem. Get our faces off the street. You’re just as guilty as me. Remember that. What are you gawking at?” You stroke your goatee so pointed and black it could be made out of coal. “They find me they find you. Understand?” The heat wants to peel the faces from the canyon of glass, the billboards with the beautiful huge people peering down. “I gotta make a call.” You lean against the building, talk on the girl’s cell phone.

#7

Port Authority depot swarms. The pretzel sellers are burning dough on the corner, twisting it. You want two with mustard on it. First we have to make money. Through the electronic doors and down the escalator to the bus gates. You walk behind me. There at gate 73 the door from the loading zone opens and a stream of weary people straggle in. In baggy jeans and purple muumuus, in bedroom slippers. The overweight driver, a white-haired guy with a cigarette in his mouth, climbs down from the bus. You approach him. “Want a date?” The driver glances over at me, takes a puff of his cigarette. Nods. He throws down his smoke, re-boards and I follow him. He doesn’t sit in the driver’s seat, but closes the door and leads me a few seats back. “Sweetheart, make it quick. They’re going to be cleaning in here.” I take down his zip and reach in and bring him out. I lick my lips because men like that. Like I’m hungry for it. I can inhale the three hundred mile long drive. I think of my favorite red knit sweater dress with a V cut away back. I’m kneeling between an empty can of Vienna sausages and a Burger King Santa Fe Salad. I’m tasting him. It’s a smallish thing. He’s breathing normally, and then he’s panting. Afterward, he touches my hair. “You look like a nice girl,” he says, raising his zip. He has beautiful blue eyes in a flat tire of a face. “Here’s an extra twenty. Get away from that thug.”

#8

You’re on the girl’s cell again. You beckon me, a finger wag. You take the money, peel off a five dollar bill. “Go get me two pretzels. Hurry.”

#9

The pretzel man. His eyes like burnt dough look out of a long thin face. “Two with mustard,” I say. He slips the crinkly paper under each, lifts the mustard bottle and a ribbon of yellow wiggles from its nostril. The brown man fingers the smoke, the miniature world where his hands live. I don’t think I’ll fetch two pretzels for you. I tuck the paper sack under my arm, pull dough apart and scatter the pieces. Pigeons scuttle around my feet. Pigeons are my favorites. Traipsing this way and that on their red legs. Their feathers muted orange blue gray radiance, the most beautiful things on this earth. “That one,” the pretzel man laughs, pointing at the dark grey pigeon with rainbow neck. “He comes everyday. Fat as a cat.” The pit of my stomach is caught in gnarl and gristle. I look down the street. I take a bite, lick mustard and watch the big one eat.

#10

I never knew my mother. My father laughed and told me I was hatched. For she leaves her eggs to the earth itself. And in the dust she keeps them warm.

#11

When I was three and four my room held one window. The building’s air shaft looked in, although sun never did. When cold hunched its shoulder against the glass, pigeons huddled on the ledge. In bitter snow they flew to warm themselves, I watched them fall into the air and then fly up. Others fell, their wings frozen, didn’t open. I couldn’t see to the bottom of the shaft where pigeons died. I carried my blanket to the window to warm them. I tried to push the glass up but it was nailed shut. Sometimes Cyndi brought me pretzels. In a little box the pretzels rested side by side, not twisted but straight as sticks. We counted them together. “Twenty five,” she’d say and her voice sounded like a purr. She would get down on her knees, push aside all her smoky brown hair and bite and tease me. Her lips outlined in dark roses and bruises from all the men kisses. Once she brought a rubber ball and six-tipped metal things. I put one in my mouth and tried to chew it. Cyndi laughed. “For fucks sake, you’re more like a little animal, aren’t you?” She took the jack from me. “I’m going to teach you.” We sat on the green rug with the rose in the center and bounced the ball. Onesies. Twosies. “Poor little animal you don’t even talk.” She let me climb into her lap to snuggle there and wrap the warm brown hair through my fingers. “Your da was a Shakespearean actor before he became a pimp and he can’t put words in his own child’s mouth.” After she left I stood at the window. White pigeons roosted on the ledge. I kissed them through the glass. Coo roo. I talked back in their language. Coo roo. Coo roo. The white pigeon with blue rainbow iridescence at his neck told me I was their friend.

#12

I give the pretzel man a dollar tip and just then police cars pull up alongside 42nd Street. An NYPD van stops at the curb and policemen jump out. I search for mustard in the corner of my mouth. Brawny men in blue uniforms rush into the Port Authority. Hands at their belts, guns. Another car squeals up. More blue men. I walk away. You are a peacock roasted and served its own plumage.

#13

I keep walking. Blue Ruin, the leather bar with go-go dancers in mesh thongs, flat beer in a chlorine-scented dark. In the window of a bookstore Barrack and Michelle Obama paper dolls and cut outs for sale. Smith’s Bar & Grill. If I had money I would go inside. I keep walking toward the light, stop, take another bite. The pretzel is good, but the mustard is better. I tear off more bread. A checkered brown pigeon hurries toward the crumbs. Do you know why a pigeon will eat almost anything? It has only 37 taste buds. A person has 9,000. Cyndi told me that long ago.

#14

I keep on moving toward Broadway, past the theaters with their smoky exteriors. Phantom of the Opera and Monty Python’s Spamalot. Frankie and Johnny’s Steakhouse. Two Guardian Angels patrol a corner of the sidewalk and when I pass by one of them winks. A police car careens down Eighth Avenue. I feel the red breath of its siren. It passes through me like a red knife. Terrible is the taste of the forbidden. The girl whose whole body hundreds of flamingo tongues covered.

#15

The dead girl was a bakery tier of cupcakes in fortresses of frosting. Marzipan peaches and strawberries. I’m an order of coffee. Chicory here, that harsh bitter brew made from bark. I’ll keep walking. I’ll never stop. I picture my history teacher. I think of the tank girls who volunteered for the Battle of Stalingrad, the partisan girls, Zoya and Masha, one hanged by a thin noose and left to slowly strangle, another high from an ash tree, her feet floating out of her shoes. Girls who went to their deaths without batting an eyelash. I think of the girl in the dumpster. Why hadn’t I run screaming from the room?

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Stephanie Dickinson has lived in Iowa, Texas, Louisiana and now in New York. Her work appears in Dirty Goat, Oranges and Sardines, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Fourteen Hills, among others. Her novel Half Girl, winner of the Hackney Award (Birmingham-Southern) is published by Spuyten Duyvil. Her stories have been reprinted in New Stories from the South, The Year’s Best, 2008 and 2009 www.stephaniedickinson.net