In High Tops

Tags

character, Chinese foot binding, life, magazine, New York City, observation, profile, subway

I see her in leather lace-up high tops. She’s a small-in-stature woman yet her feet seem smaller, still. Small, like the sexy seven and a half centimeters of beautifully bound feet in China, tied with ribbon and with cloth, figure eights holding broken toes and arches in horrible healing patterns. Her high tops swing comfortably a few inches from the floor from a middle-aged mid-section as she sits on the subway. I don’t think her non-Asian feet have adopted the foreign practice.

Inside the ankle of one shoe, no sock, there’s an impossibly small bottle tucked. A microflask. When she’s finished reading her magazine, maybe she will want the words to float from page to page, spinning from shooting her shoe.

Spontaneous Modeling

Tags

activity, applause, audience, beauty, fun, groupthink, influence, life, modeling, people, reflection, students, teaching

There was a few minutes of free time at the end of one day. Two out of four student groups had given presentations. Not presentations by regular standard, for this crew…star performances. Magnificent deliveries of spoken words, rehearsed and organized. The most hot-water students, names almost permanent on a blue sheet of paper for athletic ineligibility, stepped forward during Questions & Answers, teaching their classmates about the book they read. Confidence. Beauty.

In these post-performance precious minutes before the bell, students congregated in empty spaces, filling the atmosphere with words they use too frequently, relaxed from their pressure-cooked performances, creating friction unnecessarily between their bodies.

I started to clap my hands from behind my desk, slowly at first. Then louder, more emphatically. They heard me and clapped. Twenty students, clapping with eyebrows raised, heads shifting in surprise like swivels on their skinny necks. No idea why they had started to clap. I heard a few exclamations, questions at the nature of our celebration, but the clapping didn’t cease. I said nothing, just raised my applause above my head and sped up. They clapped along, faster still. By no prompting, they started to woot and cheer. Just general ah-ha’s and woo-hoo’s. Not for any one person, just for the clapping itself.

Soon, laughter at the spectacle, and the speed of it’s escalation brought tears to my eyes. Floods of them. I had to stand up and make amiable acquaintance with the tissue box near the sink. When I quit, they quit, clap by clap.

The groupthink concept overtook them. The aura of peer pressure swept them into action without reason or sense, without command or repercussion. They all just clapped and clapped, cheered and rejoiced for nothing, for no one–because a spontaneous clap grew from the somewhere.  An anonymous leader emerged from the bowels of the classroom and they followed, carried it on, curiously, but without needing a reason, any instruction.

I loved the momentary rush it gave us all in the minutes before the bell. Their questions, their surprise, amazement at the superfluousity of the experiment. They loved that I was as purposeless as they were.  This was before they knew that I am really a lot like them.  Most of them still don’t realize.   

All the laughing, the clapping, the wooting together.  Immature and unreasonable. Adults and children.  And children who think themselves adults.   One unified spontaneous classroom noise.  Beautiful.

O on the R Train [part I]

Tags

character, city, downtown, life, New York City, NYC, story, subway, travel, writing

He and a thin, middle-aged Asian man in a polo shirt were looking to sit at the same time. Both would rest in seats near me when the choosing is done. I could see the decisions being made in the subtle shifting of their eyes. I, myself, had only chosen to sit on account of—earlier—choosing the wrong shoes. To wear, yes. But also to buy and to keep. They hurt my feet; I could feel the blister near my big toe, where I’ll grow a bunion in my old age, like my grandmother did.

The Asian man sat first, two seats from me, leaving the only space on the bench the one next to me. This seat, the other man took, the one whose name I learned shortly after his sitting down and also immediately forgot, whether for it’s tribal-slash-ethnic complexities through which it forced my tongue, or my desired separation with the absurd experience that ensued—which, I’m unsure.

It started with an “O” sound.

O asked for the time. No reason not to oblige.

2.Limes

Tags

100 words, Corona, exercise, food, grocery, http://ibecameashepherd.blogspot.com/, life, New York City, NYC, one hundred words, writing prompt

No browsing, no basket, no list tonight.

I make the avocados tumble from pyramidal piles. A case of Corona, cheese with jalapenos, bagged together on the street with the rain. The longnecks kiss my knuckles with their cold on the way home.

I’ve forgotten the limes. Only naked-necked bottles of Corona, no limes. I won’t fold fajitas without a citrus squeeze over the meat. A new receipt. Holding the cold case, both hands, a thigh.

This city moves so fast; these clocks wear thin. I can’t move through the motions without a list. I’ll, each time, forget the limes.

1.My Love

Tags

100 words, airport, exercise, http://ibecameashepherd.blogspot.com/, new york, one hundred words, waiting, writing prompt

I stood where the airport spit out beautiful people. In New York, there are only beautiful people and also, today, me.

I stood waiting on the corner where he’d said wait, wondering if coming was best, if any of my daydreams would be burst apart or fashioned together when he drew open the door of a yellow cab. A lip, mine, flushed red from nervous nibbles. A nail, right thumb, pulled clean to the pink bed in fidgets. It’d been two years.

He wore headphones the same around his neck. Still the straps of the old backpack showing. My love.

the celebration [5/5]

Tags

community, engagement story, journey, lifetime, love, marriage, party, proposal, relationship, series, storytelling, wedding

Previous posts in this series include:

the waiting

the clues

the ring

the cowboy

And today, to complete the series: the celebration

At the Post Office, thrilled to have just mailed our WANTED poster invitations

Rings on Her Fingers

Tags

beauty, character, girl, life, observation, people, relationships, storytelling, subway

There are rings on all the wrong fingers, slender knuckles, long nails, no polish. Chunky stones set in silver, twisted metal caressing smooth skin, beaded trinkets hanging from bent wood. From her fingers I decide that when they choose her it’s only for one night. Or for weeks at a time. Never—yet—for a lifetime. And I can’t figure why.

I fell in lust with her on the one train downtown. Her long hair, tousled, hadn’t seen a brush yet today. It was late in the afternoon, locks still latched on skyrise buildings, Wall Streeters not yet freed to the streets, and only the running of her fingertips through the curls on the ends of her locks had kept the thick mane tame. Her perfect form, bronze glow, curves of all the right sizes in all the right places, wrapped casually in subtle straps, a gray tank, woven shoulder-strung purse, jean shorts, torn.  She fit like a whisper between two faceless bodies on the plastic blue infinite subway seat.  Her almond eyes, lashes long, that blinked curiously around the train car as it cushioned with late-lunching New Yawkers. She never squinted cruelly at them. Never bristled. Only slid back effortlessly into her headphones.

And as she wondered, I wondered about her. About what makes her, impossibly, just a one-night girl, with rings on all the wrong fingers.

Behind Closed Doors

Tags

character, crying, heart, observation, pain, pretend

I wonder about her story, the girl behind the closed door. She says nothing for minutes after the lock latches and soles heel-toe down the hall because there’s nothing to say. There are only those first seconds after he leaves to let the silence keep on repeating the stale lies that she should leave, pack her luggage tonight, that dissonance seeds decay.

I wonder if, when the door closes, loneliness descends. If she stands alone in a space too tall and wide, suffocating tonight. Smashed inside her chest cavity, her heart is crushed under the weight of no sound. It becomes hard to breath. Through clenched teeth and tongue, the air whistles as she draws deeper breaths, craving oxygen so her lungs can fill, and her shoulders heave. It’s no use. Tears fall freely, trails of mucus, too. She breaks the silence in colors and cries, stained glass shattered beneath her bare tender feet.

An hour in the mind passes, three minutes on the clock. A victim of convulsions that tremor in the ends of the fingertips, pushing her stomach into feigned pregnancy in periodic dry heaves. She calms herself with self-help techniques from potpourri time in therapy, talks herself into relaxation that is like sleep but consciously.

If she stays, what makes it okay? She’ll wash her face, a cold rag on thin eyes. Take her made-up face into the world where no ones knows her name. Play-act and pretend in a place where she feels safe.  Until she returns or he leaves and she’s left again with this impossible voicelessness.

Children at Play

Tags

childhood, children, freedom, gender, gender roles, growing, kids, lust, Park, playground, sex, sexuality, youth

They say children should play in mixed genders until aged 5. It’s most healthy that way, I hear that they say. More natural according to charts of developmental stages. Good for their brain chemistry. Normal, I suppose. Status quo.

Children don’t realize their gender differences amidst primary-colored dump trucks and plastic-parted dolls. Or don’t care. There aren’t attractions or sexual urges to push this or that boundary. None of the things that make us worry in our ages beyond 5. That make us click it’s complicated.

So when they pile up down at the bottom of the slide, boy-girl-boy, limbs all askew, bodies pressed Oshkosh together, hands pushing to free themselves from tangle, I can be sure their laughter is not questionable, not laden with lust or the leaning towards such. It’s innocent play, the tummy-flip feeling that the benign drop of the slide breathes into young lungs. And, in giggles and sandaled steps, they’ll do it again, running up plastic stairs to pile platonically again at the bottom. But three times is a bore. They’ll move on, unassuming, to something more. Naa naa na-naa-nah, taunting as they run.