Under the surface
14 August 2011 06:13 AM Categories: Fiction | Writing prompts
She had alibis, the appearance alibi, the shyness alibi. A coworker once told her she would make a good drug mule. No one would suspect the hint of darkness at her core, the nights she spent watching her boyfriend break apart cocaine with a razor before handing her the rolled dollar bill, the bottle she hid in her underwear drawer, her dreams of men knifed in broad daylight by women in leather catsuits and masks. She could exploit her appearance, or, really, exploit their inattention, so there she was, pinned and loving it, in the backseat of a broad car from the late 60s, the car older than she was and made for large families or the creation of them, her parents clueless, her boyfriend elsewhere.
Sometimes she would go down to the bar a few blocks away and sit, waiting, waiting for the lonely men with their beer or whiskey, the ones who treated her to new things (oysters on the half-shell, too-spicy salsa, the layered shots and stories of grownup life). They touched her hand, they stroked her hair. Most of them didn’t want a thing but conversation. They liked to take her apparent innocence, make a fetish out of it, the girl they were protecting from their like, the quasi-daughter, the fantasy.
On her last night in her hometown, she befriended an elderly man at the bar who regaled her with New York jazz tales from the 40s and 50s. He told her she looked like Veronica Lake. He spoke of his dead wife. And when it was time to go home, she walked with him hand in hand, accepting a chaste kiss on the cheek before he stepped, alone, into his house.
From a photo prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by shimonkey.
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