Being the free love days of the late 60’s, parents, aunts, uncles and their friends were regularly high and alternated between “wow man” and accusatory outbursts born of that Hitchcockian error of paranoid cinema that collided so perfectly with the chemical residue of that generation’s entitlement.
The girl played in her room while the arguing bounced between fascination and confusion in some kind of absurd, endless tennis game where no one remembered to keep score. By 1972 she completed a novella and had mastered the art of levitation after finding a copy of Alistair Crowley’s Book 4 in some visiting hippie’s duffel bag.
On February 25, 1974, the school bell rang and class was dismissed for the day. The girl walked into the snowy afternoon, waved goodbye to her friends and was never seen again. Missing from her home were her novella, most of her short stories, all of her underpants, 2 cans of cream corn, 4 cans of Snack Pack chocolate pudding, the TV Guide, an Edith Piaf record and her father’s collection of Kennedy half dollars.
There were a few leads that first year and after that, it was if she never existed.
If this story is true, these poems were written by a five year old:
If this story is true, these poems were written by a five year old:
FITS OF SUMMER
I revisit my errors like beautiful lovers in summer.
Back to them, back to them,
waves crash the shore.
85 degrees and an ice cream cone,
watch out for jellyfish
don’t swallow the watermelon pits.
But my errors are less forgiving
and their presence hovers in rawness;
hovers in rain and run for cover,
all the board games are missing pieces.
I bring them to the surface out of nothing but fucking boredom.
I bring them to the surface out of nothing but fucking boredom.
I bring them to the surface out of nothing but fucking boredom.
How could I do that? Why didn’t I do this?
Where did I go wrong? Where did I go left?
My failures keep me company in the sunset of my sanity.
It’s a recipe for success, handed down for generations and really,
who am I to break such a wonderful tradition?
ANY GIRL IN ANY TOWN
A girl walks into a bar. It’s a nice enough bar. She sits down and orders a white wine.
A man at the end tells the bartender to put it on his tab which he does and she accepts. Fifteen minutes later she is 4 seats to her right and they are awkwardly laughing
about
nothing.
They go outside for a cigarette because you can’t smoke indoors anymore. They make exaggerated comments about the cold while pulling poison into their lungs in the 30 degree night of possibilities. She exhales puff number 4 and looks down: he is wearing ridiculously outdated shoes. It is a needle being raked across vinyl, the soundtrack to well rehearsed exit lines and a ‘thank you for the drink’. And it all happens far too quickly for him to think it is anything but rejection. He ties his shoe, the laces wrapping likes snakes in the grass, and goes back inside, the fool.
Late that night, after half a bottle of wine and 12 french cigarettes which she smokes indoors because its her bedroom and she can do what she wants, she calls her ex-husband who is abusive and makes her feel worthless.
But he wears really cool shoes.
She smokes a joint, cries until her cheeks are covered in the wet scrapings from the bottom of the only Chanel mascara she’ll ever own and falls asleep without washing her face. The cat misses the litter box again because he is 18 and can’t see it.
In the morning she will have two blemishes on her cheek and there will be no cream for her coffee. She will smoke a french cigarette by the kitchen window watching pigeons through tears as they gather on the ledge of the building across the alley.
They do it every morning. Four of them fly away early.
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