Vacuous
Every word from her mouth hit my ears like pennies in a stainless steel pot: loud and worthless and somehow still echoing their worthlessness long after they have landed.
She was an idiot. She could speak at length on any subject and never even come close to producing one accurate statement. That's quite a trick. That's someone who spends her entire life wandering around the dark forest of her own brain without a map or a flashlight or even an inkling that one tree might be different from another, or that walking in a circle might not be the way out.
She believed in ghosts and angels and vampires and Bigfoot. She would pull out her tarot cards and tell me about my future, and I would watch her lips move and wonder if anything other than pure, unvarnished bullshit had ever passed over them. I would watch her giant black eyes plump up with excitement as she flipped over each card and began to recite one inaccuracy after another about my life. I would study the shape of her head and wonder what must have gone wrong during its construction, and I would try to imagine what would happen to it if she ever had an original idea, if she ever stumbled onto a notion that hadn't already been chewed up and spit out by some other moron, if she ever managed to accidentally assemble a mental equation that would result in a coherent thought.
Would the cartilage that makes up the structure of her skull be able to handle the shock? Would it explode and spray the rest of us with gooey bits of her idiocy, or would it implode like a star succumbing to the weight of its own density?
These were the thoughts I would have as she talked and talked and talked. She chain-smoked Viceroys and constantly rolled the burning end on the cement stairs out back as she smoked them to keep them from developing an ash, but she constantly flicked them anyway. She drank cup after cup of cheap coffee that she would buy from the horny old guy at the nut store, and she hated when I told her it tasted like "ass with a hint of hickory". And her left eye would always twitch whenever she exaggerated the details of a story to make it sound more dramatic, which was how I knew she was bluffing when we played cards.
I'll never forget her, but I'd like to. She wasn't a bad person, just..vacuous. But I wish her love and happiness and peace, and I hope she finds someone who will take care of her and be good to her and make her feel special.
And that poor fucker can keep her.
copyright 2007 john bizarre
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