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She skips down the alley willy-nilly, dodging potholes and puddles. Her footsteps echo between the concrete walls and rolling metal security shutters. In the circle of light cast by a streetlamp, she leaps suddenly into the air and twirls, arms joyously flailing. Her chin is raised up and she smiles to the Gods who are certainly smiling back down on her. When she tires, she comes to an abrupt stop and collapses with her palms on her knees, chest heaving. She is giggling, as if even now her stationary body must express itself in movement, even if it’s just the emission of rapid-fire panting.
I start to say something but she puts her finger to my lips. Shhh, she mouths. There is a glitter in her eyes but it is her lips that I am watching. It occurs to me that they are, objectively, perfectly-formed lips. These are, objectively, what lips really should look like. And she apparently knows this as she has painted them an intense red, making their beauty even more excruciating.
She takes my hand and leads me down sidestreets that I don’t recognize, turning left, then right, then left until I have lost all sense of direction. We might be going round in cicles for all I know. Come on, come on, she says, with smiling urgency.
She leads me to an abandoned house. The shutters are all closed and she must jiggle the key in the lock many times to make it turn. Everything is dark inside and I stumble but she seems to already know this place. She leads me through rooms, down hallways, up stairs.
In one room she points to the ceiling. There is a trap door cut into it with a rope hanging down. She gestures for me to pull it. I give it a quick pull and the spring-loaded door drops slowly and from it an articulated stairway unfurls.
Follow me, she gestures. Come on, she winks.
I climb the rickety staircase behind her and emerge into what seems a life-sized architect’s model, you know those miniatures where walls are cut away to reveal the inside structure. Half the roof is intact. It slopes from a central beam to the floor with two gabled windows and boxes of abandoned items scattered here and there. But on the other side of the beam, the roof has been ripped cleanly off. There is only sky. A thicket of rebar stumps marks the separation between where we can stand and the void.
On the sky side, an old leather sofa sits under the stars. She walks over to it and sits down. Again, she gestures to me; I am always lagging, always wary, always a step behind.
The night air is chill so the warmth of her thigh against mine is compelling. She is staring up at the sky with a big smile. In the dark, she pats the couch between us until she finds my hand, weaves her fingers between mine and squeezes. We both look up at the stars and I too now feel the Night Gods smiling down on me.
Ah, so this is all she wanted.
The Little Epiphanies series is written by Kevin Carrel Footer. Subscribe & support and get exclusive access at https://www.kevincarrelfooter.com/join/
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