details

An obnoxious and overperfumed brunette with a tacky flower barrette pushes past me at the book store. she barely squeezes into a faded black sweater and there is mauve lipstick that slowly seeps into the paperthin lines above her lips like an hourglass in reverse. Some is beginning to stick to her front teeth, which are slightly yellow due to years of smoking virginia slims, or so we must presume. Someone recommends aldous huxley. She chews her gum, lightly spraying "brave new world" with berry mint flavored spittle. She drops the book. thoroughly disenchanted. She looks to the clerk, chewing her gum like a bullfrog does as it relishes its fly. "so where is the romance section?"

and then she is gone, whisked away to exotic Cyprus, where her tan Greek lover doesn't care about the deep red lines that her l'eggs pantyhose with control top leaves on her slightly flabby stomach, and he doesn't ask about the man who she loved when her stomach was flat and her teeth were white, and he certainly doesn't ask about the man who left her while she slept, leaving nothing but an old barrette between the sheets of their bed with a long blonde hair hanging from it like a stubborn loose tooth (she found it the next week when waking; it molded itself overnight to her side as a cold, brittle truth). Her lover only cares about her, and her now, and he loves her crafty flower barrettes and he lives for her berry mint and menthol flavored kisses. And she is happy and safe and loved and warm when she leaves; she feels like that's what good books should do for people. Who is Allen Huxby, anyway, and what does he know about being brave?