Suspension [chapter 1]

A man, shrugging loosely into his leather jacket and shaking his slicked back hair, pulls on his cigarette with an inherent desire. Pulls on it with the belief of turning back time, but lets the obsession with things broken and long faded go with her memory now, falling on the end of the smoke. He lets it fill his lungs, aware of the slow decomposition with each drag, then releases it. A therapeutic memorial early in the morning, while he stares dispassionately at the sky. In another time, another life, it would split open, draw apart as curtain, a sticky, sickly white of milky eyes.

Today, although he is groggy and his stomach is sour, is not a day like others. He feels it in his bones like a wire running through his skeleton. Less dramatically, the chill of the wind that creeps under the protection of his jacket and seeps into his warmth.  A Joe to go is what he needs to set himself into the motion of the restless, eternally woken world. The ignition, spark of animation, breath into his hollow body runs his blood faster in anticipation.

Honking of horns, the bumping of bodies in waiting, clanking as change is exchanged between hands. A soft grunt of pleasure escapes him, but it is short lived. As short as the child lying on the concrete when he elbows his way through the gasping, shock-filled, distant faces.  The child, a young girl with stingy matted blond hair caressing the sides of her face in pale strands, remains still and her spine rolls up and arches and falls down, a red flower blooming in full arc beneath her awkwardly positioned body. Placed face down, arm tied into a bow, her leg a cane, broken in two. No one makes a motion, they blur, their eyes melted wax pooling in their open, fish-gaped mouths, when he falls to his knees, hands shaking like his nerves are caught on fire. His mouth is open in a slack horrified revelation, a coherent lexis unable to be uttered.

Broken fragments enter his ear: “¿Por qué nadie ayuda?”… He hit her…Jes—…somebody call—…Ave Maria…—

A pearly bone juts from her flesh, a tear ripped into her elbow, blood rushing like a gaping river.

He watches. ER doctor, Benson. Unable to save the life of a small child, blood pouring out her mouth and onto flower beneath her, a stem connecting her barely to life, and suspending her before death.

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notes: new novel.

edited: once. posted for bitchville