Some Sunday in April

I submitted this to Gangsters in Concrete the other day, and I like it a lot better than the short-short I wrote for Stork, which just came out. Plain face.

I’ve been feeling like an orphan lately. My clothes are worn and could use some patches. There’s always dirt behind my ears and no one there to take a bar of soap to them.

So I wander the city, looking for things.

Today the sidewalks are lined with lilies wrapped in cellophane and the buds on the trees are bursting yellow. I can feel a pollen paste sitting in the back of my throat. I stop at a pharmacy and debate over antihistamine pills for half an hour. I have pocket money from feeding an old woman’s cats. She has more than twenty and I’m allergic to them, too. She should really just pay me in these pink pills.

I buy a generic brand and two Cadbury eggs. I sit on the stone steps of a church and watch pastel families go in and out. I swallow the pills and lap the grainy cream from the chocolate shells.

A woman who looks a lot like my mother, all beige skirt and clean fingernails, stands on the steps to smoke a cigarette. I nearly tapped her on the shoulder, nearly cried out, “Well, take me home already!” I wanted to be in her arms, chewing ice clusters from a glass of too-cold milk, my head rising and falling against her lungs.

But I’m an orphan, so instead I decided to take a train somewhere.

Across from my seat there is a little boy sucking on a red lollipop, turning the cardboard stick into a wet pulp. He is an orphan too, I can tell. We send out these secret signals. I want to ask him if he’ll be my little brother, but then he starts making video game bleeps and beeps for no reason and jumping in his seat. I’m probably better off alone.

At each stop the driver says through the intercom, “Thank you for riding. Thank you so much. Have a beautiful day.” He seems so grateful for all these people whose faces he can’t even see.

I imagine him driving the train to his house, his family still in the yard, waiting for him. The sun is just setting and everything seems to be happening on the inside of a tangerine.

“Hiya daddy!” his grass-stained children will shout.

“Welcome home, sweetheart,” his perfumed wife will say.

And they’ll go inside, say prayers over lamb with mint jelly, and leave the tangerine to sleep in the icebox of moonlight.

I ride the train to the last stop. Instead of breaking from the tracks it just moves in reverse. So I get off at a stop I know and sleep on my friend’s couch.