Through Window Glass

Yesterday, humidity hung in the air, heavy and unrelenting causing time to slow down and surrender to its will. Days passed between noon and three as people sat and waited for the first hint of a breeze. It did not come, nor did any sign of refreshment awaken them from the stupor summer heat.

It had just been this morning when she’d looked out the window and seen a garbage man give the finger to the sky. She smiled at him, this modern-day Nimrod, warring against the powers of the heavens, certain to fail but defiant nonetheless.

He’d seen her standing there in her nightgown, the one that was see-through in just the right light, and lowered his dime-store sunglasses before giving her a salacious look.

She jumped away from the window, though she knew it had been too late. He had seen her in full-view. There was nothing to hide anymore. She had revealed herself unknowingly even as he had done the same to the sky. She clung to the wall, even though she was well out of his range of vision. It didn’t matter, because she could still feel him there. He was waiting for her to return. He had forgotten the heat of this unnaturally hot day.

After creeping into the bedroom and closing the door, she opened the medicine cabinet looking for something to sedate her away from the revelations she’d revealed through window glass.

“My body is a feast of poignant remorse,” she sighed. “Beauty no longer sits on me with queenly ease.”

She heard the garbage truck grumble its way down the street and walked to the window to draw the curtain across exhausted and bloodshot glass. She was wrong; he wasn’t there, having long abandoned any hopes of a second glimpse of her silky turquoise shadows and reveals.

He would think of her every garbage day, wondering, hoping that she would appear once again. Years would pass as his thoughts careened from the truth of what he’d seen to the perfection of what he’d created in memory. By the time he was old, she’d become every great beauty from the beginning of time.

She had continued the day feeling ashamed because of the vulnerability of nakedness while journeying from a new guacamole recipe, to the cupboard and back in hopes of forgetting herself in mindlessness. The low hum of barge music across the bay and the songs of cicada honeyed the stillness of afternoon heat. Months later when the earth had circled another half-year, she’d gone to a party and schmoozed with the host about the importance of unimportant things.

The furnace blew hot air across the room, summoning gooseflesh as the memory of that day beckoned her back. What had been so important about any of it that it lingered? She’d shared a moment with a stranger that been more real than all the pointless conversations she’d begun, harvested and ended.

She darted across the room between conversations about “Catcher in the Rye,” “The Nutcracker” and the current confusion about the current state of the affairs of the world. There were no answers, only words that rested upon each other in an exhausted orgy of waste.

Walking home in the confused hush of the city, amongst the debris of forgotten dreams and ambitions, she’d stumbled across a pair of broken goggles. Her face reflected back from the mirrored lens that was shattered on the pavement. Hours later as she removed the eyelet lace blouse that revealed tiny patterns of peek-a-boo skin, she heard the low growl of a garbage truck in the distance and turned out the light.