Bitten Walk

She shivered inside her coat, allowing the silence of Upper Street to buzz into her eardrums and cause a tingle down her spine. This night, as she looked up at the moon, pregnant as its time of month would have it, she was prepared to allow the discreetness of evil have its way with her. Intentionally, she walked down the avenues of most resistance to all kind. In her pocket was her identification, solely, so if she were subtly stabbed in the side, which she’d mercifully adjust physically to so that it would actually kill her, her body would readily be identified as that of Donka. The appropriate measures then taken of contacting her family, which, she imagined, would be similar to her parents receiving the news that horses adjust swifter than donkeys. She enjoyed this image, Donka did, of herself lying dead in some obscure lane, which anyone who knew her would wonder why she was in anyhow. This was a brave secret of hers, these death marches.
Already Donka added up the entire cost of her being at the moment of walking down the street, and unless someone wanted to donate her organs for thousands she was no worth more than a cheap university mug. So, in this, she felt like she rightfully would dupe the system that would send her to martyrdom. Donka was faithless anyway, mending any tatterings in her cloak would surely dishevel within moments of conclusion of needle and thread.
The burden that emptied and dried her of substance was precisely that which gave her color. Donka would not happily settle within herself the dispute of what was right and wrong with her being. She chose, often nights, to walk municipally around the town to survey what others found so easy. A certain contemporary morality vanished from her understanding, but she looked around her, wondering, with scrunched brow, what of this society she could relate to.

Often on these evenings posturing about the rollicking roads full of bars, translucent grins and misappropriated energies, manmade textures and colors, vivid nonorganic visuals streaming like the gutter of a nuclear waste site. She would get frustrated and turn around heading north, where the streets went one way and no one driving could get out of the neighborhood without good directions or happy accidental turns. It was this part of town that disintegrated rapidly block by block. This was where Donka saw faces so anguished from the day’s misspent labor, the dimes it added up to, how each day was gladdened purely for the survival of it, and even then the pain was questionably too astonishingly delivered. And it was here that Donka felt most assured in humanity. Still, secretly she hoped for a stab in the back, a random shot in the dark, someone to beat her and mug her, to take away the senseless despair she consistently found herself in.

Unfortunately, perhaps, she blended in too well. Though she did wear a nice coat her friend had found (“Ah, this is just your size,” she could hear Carlene declaring, proudly holding it above her like a trophy), she did not wear it correctly. She had taken off its belt, as Donka thought her midsection looked frumpy with it fastened, and singed the part that hit her right thigh, while warming it on the mammoth gas heater in her apartment. Also, and perhaps more importantly, she had the attitude of a person down deeply without luck, like her parents had just thrown her out upon finding great bulging tumors on her scalp, like her entire world had been depleted and she found herself miserably thrust in her least favorite town for an echoing eternity. She did not wear the face of aristocracy, the particular brand of person that was so easy to rip off, if you knew the proper way of reaching into a person’s pocket and the exact speed at which to do it. She even, passers by thought, could pass for a terrible whore, a woman just recently turned. Nor did Donka smell appropriately financially sound. Hers was a peculiar odor, a musk she tried masking with lemon and clove, but which impressed upon others as “cattish and smoky.” She rarely washed her hair and found great difficulty maneuvering in make-up sections, thus looking and smelling the part of a woman undone. It was hard for men to find her attractive.

Her mind, this evening, was flippant, raging with a certain destruction that only years of repression allowed for. She had found a broach on the ground in the busier quadrant of town, one with amber flecks whirled about in a hazy, abstract manner, reminding her bitingly of her dead grandmother, who wore broaches and scarves and dresses with matching jackets and make-up. She had her hair done twice a month and was religious about hosiery. Slipping into a self-effacing monologue, she sarcastically applauded her parents for naming her after the woman she was least like. This broach she found on the ground was channeling through her fingers inside a pocket, opening and closing its fastening, abruptly ending her self-defeating diatribe and wondering at the brooch’s ability as a weapon, with it’s short, sturdy pin with a fine tip. 

Banana Leaves

The rags that covered the duo’s torsos were made out of banana leaves. Before jet engines fell from puffy gray clouds on the Pacific’s sundry beachline banana trees hung heavily with saturation, ripe fruit, monkeys delivering laughter. The pair happened to be naked at the right moment, still dripping from their dip in the ocean, frivolously tying together coverage for their genitals. It was law, no nudity. Pieces of a beetle shell were still fastened to Jeanette’s just next to a mole on her thigh. Jeanette and Apollo had several comrades who were banana messengers, some close connections to the outer world, as produce messengers, specifically fruit, were sent into foreign lands to deliver their forbidden goods.

The two needed to find an alley soon, or find the city’s limits, a place to pee, maybe to find a few scraps left behind by another of their sordid, outlived, nomadic kind. They had been shucking what beans grew wildly on wire fences for ten days, wrapped in green onions that Jeanette had tied together and slung over her shoulder. The bean plants’ yellow leaves indicated the delicacy of their temperament. Apollo looked at his partner, eyes gloomy, lips parted and white from dried saliva. The gash on his forehead drove throbs that rattled his thoughts. He lost his ability to speak two days ago. Jeanette noticed his gaze and hesitated with her words.

“You cannot walk much further today. The sun is reaching its apex. We’ll rest awhile when we approach the river, maybe find some shade?” He nodded a weary approval, slowly blinking. She knew to not beg for anything. This country was not good for generosity, and one could be murdered for entertaining such notions. Every man for his own, she chanted internally. She stopped and stood in front of Apollo, handling the water canteen, dampening a worn brown handkerchief, stained with blackened blood. Applying this to her partner, wringing a stream along his neck, then gingerly dampening the back of her neck. She then tied it to Apollo’s forehead, covering his bruises and the single square-shaped gash.

They continued, leaving the town’s deserted limits. No-one approached their path for seemingly weeks. Days slipped into overdrawn epic struggles to stay on two feet, let alone walk twenty, sometimes thirty miles a day, usually barely aware of one another. Jeanette wondered if she’d begin an evolutionary descent, crawling on all fours, walking part of a bygone species. Was anyone else alive after all the rotten debris? The heat was pressing her skin, a sticky mass. The toxicity of local air wasn’t as bad here, not like it was in previous provinces. They weren’t accustomed to cleanliness.

Jeanette perked at this thought. A slacking toxicity meant the river would carry health and good fortune from mountaintops, less a suicidal bounty. Apollo would likely regain his speech and together they would have coalescing stronger dreams, the clouds of their dreams would string together and form a fortress impenetrable. Apollo tripped over a dusty rock in the path, his expression unconscious. Vultures above noted this unforgiving moment. Tucked in Apollo’s thong was a rickety slingshot. Birds in this area were particularly gruesome. Their feasts were harder to find, animals were stronger here than the aviary and did not fear winged beasts. In particular, though, these vultures were two times larger than Apollo, and their cries were getting louder. Helping Apollo to his feet, she also took the rock he stumbled over and launched it with the slingshot. One of the two birds immediately fell to the ground several yards away. Dead. Apollo, enchanted, for the first time in months smiled. The second vulture migrated south.