may

We lounged about. In our rooms, in the lobby with the grand puzzle, in the big room at the end of the tiled hallway where Law & Order re-runs played out on a twenty inch beast that hummed through commercials and flickered during shows. In the bathroom with the spiders and sticky floor, where Charlotte a woman near forty liked to hide behind the toilet bowl and purr, liked flushing her pills down the drain. But never outside. We weren’t allowed outside. Only outside for cigarette breaks – four times a day, the first one at six a.m. Outside taunted us, it haunted me. It sat there poker faced behind five caged windows that lined a wall of the big room. Outside, a massive tree spurting off branches and roots, which rose through the dirt in knotted knolls up and over the cracked stone pathway leading to a rotting red park bench, passed on in its glory without us. It seemed to march. So deliberate, so callous, I thought I would drown. I wanted autumn, I wanted to rake, I wanted to cut my palms raking, I wanted to stick my hands in the soil and come out with a worm. Beyond the massive tree were more trees, a forest of trees. A drained moat. Two wire lawn chairs thrown together, side by side, one rusting at its feet. A ten foot high chain link fence. A trash barrel full of cigarette butts and small paper Dixie cups. A spider that would bite me while I smoked a Newport with a vainglorious heroin addict name Tricia, a bite that’d turn my left calf purple.