LUCY JINX: Book Three

By Pablo D'Stair

At once gargantuan and miniaturist THE LUCY JINX TRILOGY is an intimate Epic, spanning eight years in the life and innermost mind of the titular poet as she navigates ambitions, friendships, lovers, and, above all, her monstrous, psychically tumultuous relationships with language, identity, and purpose; a portrait-of-the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Late Marriage Press
• Release date: May 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088143209

Pablo D'Stair

Pablo D'Stair is a novelist, filmmaker, essayist, interviewer, comic book artist, and independent publisher. His work has appeared in various mediums for the past 15 years, often pseudonymously.

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LUCY JINX

Book Three

Pablo D’Stair

Copyright © 2016/2023 Pablo D’Stair

Published by Late Marriage Press

for my mother, Catherine VanBrocklin

who told me the type of my soul

A woman's voice on the radio

can convince you you're in love;

A woman's voice on the telephone

can convince you you're alone

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

Piece of Dirt

I

HIS NAME IS LUCY JINX.

Lucy Jinx carved it on the stone, herself, and now the stone is there.

This is on the side of the road, exactly where the two of them met.

This is exactly where the cat’s now buried, in a hole dug by Lucy’s own hands—she’d paused, to seem as though just smoking a cigarette, the few times some cars had passed by.

How had Lucy carved the stone?

Rather clumsily and with a screwdriver.

And how is she certain this is the same spot, the spot where they’d collided?

Truthfully, she cannot be entirely certain.

She knows enough to remember about how many miles off it was from the Starlite Deluxe Hotel.

And this feels like the spot.

It looks like the spot.

Either way: The cat is interred and its rest will remain inviolate, so now this is the only place that matters.

Lucy’s hands are murky with the grave.

Any dirt can be grave-dirtied, the world a ready-made stretch of places to bury.

Ground ought just be called Graves, she decides.

Earth should just be called Grave.

Soil: Grave.

‘All the variants’ she says with a dismissive wave of her hand, mouthing the smoke of this last drag all around.

The chill night is doing its best to keep the air stationary.

This night is trying to resemble a spine with fine posture to hide what a coiling, unkempt pile it is.

To wit: A woman called Lucy Jinx has just buried a cat called Lucy Jinx.

Tell that to someone and take odds on whether they’ll deem it remotely ordinary or above reproach.

Such untoward things filth through this night, this dark, this time that seems right for memories you want all for yourself or else the ones you’re stuck with and stuck with alone, want them or not.

What night ever isn’t a mess—yes—and hence the only real reason for there to be daytime—the sun is the moon’s warm ablution.

This must be the place, Lucy.

Yes.

Doesn’t she recall that exact building, out in the field?

‘Well no’ she immediately frumps.

She remembers harrows of long flatness inside of soul and screaming and the smithereens of her vision turned against her.

This probably isn’t the spot.

And now: It is.

There’s the stone.

Here’s Lucy Jinx, noting to herself what bad shape she’s in—the digging has halved her, she’s ready for bed.

There it is.

His name is Lucy Jinx—immortalized on a stone no one knows no one but her is supposed to know of.

Big old mouth, yawn crik-criking her jaw, Lucy’s not quite ready to speak.

Another car goes by and she remains thankful how it, as like the others, didn’t stop to see if she required assistance.

People are wise.

It’s only in fictions where folks stop to see what the shot is with women smoking near shouldered cars in the dead waste of night.

Movie deaths come from that.

Or make-believe movie loves.

So help her Jesus, if any person who turned out to have children in the car with them had pulled over to help her, she would’ve brained them but good and called the authorities to get the kids placed into more responsible care, toot suite.

Each drag of her smoke tastes a bit of her unwashed hands.

Because of how noses work.

Science!

It still disappoints her how taste and smell aren’t entirely separate entities. It’s disappointed her since she was a wee little gal and first had learned it.

Without smell you cannot taste.

Without taste you cannot smell.

She lost all respect for both.

‘Then why not just call them one thing?’ she’d asked the teacher, expecting sagacity in return and instead getting—well, she doesn’t remember really—either ‘I don’t know’ or some fa-la-la or else the word Olfactory.

Is it so important to have five senses?

That’s how she’d met Ginnifer—Ginnifer who’d agreed how her parents had spelled her name wrong.

This is Lucy, in a field, after manual burial—as with the ancient and languageless it must’ve been—hop-scotching memories she long ago lost use for.

‘Oh—this is the use!’

She scoffs.

Don’t start believing in that kind of chicanery again, Lucy!

You could just as well remember the first time you ever heard the term Toejam.

Which you don’t, by the way.

Search as you will, it’s gone.

Not the word, but the entry-wound of it.

But doesn’t it put you in mind of the worms crawling in, the worms crawling out, the worms playing pinochle on your snout?

And—Holy smokes!—is that where you heard it, first?

They eat your eyes, they eat your nose, they eat the jam between your toes?

Unconvinced, Lucy looks at exactly that cloud there and is pleased it resembles nothing, hardly even a cloud.

It might be true, that about Toejam, but still—be it the first time you thought of it or not—the term rounds nicely, full-circle, to now.

So: Checkmate.

Even remembering something you’d forgotten when you first learned ties primly back to here at the head of a grave.

‘Then again …’ Lucy sighs, discarding her cigarette, ready to speak ‘… what doesn’t seem reasonable on top of a dead cat?’

‘I coulda written ya a fine speech, a real send off, Jinx—I could be orating a eulogy that I’d be able to charge folks to reprint in anthologies. But ah, Jinx, damnit, damn you—Jinx you woulda hated that! You’d have found it unseemly. A bore. You’d have yawned in that way you did which you pretended was so fucking original but—let’s be honest—really was just the way a cat yawns. I look around, Jinx, I see. You weren’t the only cat, no matter how much you tried to tell me otherwise. I humored you. Idiot. You really thought you had me fooled! Well—so my point is: I coulda done up a number for you, but you spoilt that for yourself. Right outta the teat, that was pinch-tart, never gonna happen—so don’t send your complaints to me. What do I have to say about you, Lucy Jinx? My speech begins thus: I will miss you. I’ll be complimented for that, Jinx. The simplicity of it. For ages. Look how she starts, so simply, with ‘I miss you’! Ah they’ll say Oh oh! They’ll say. Morons, Jinx. Cooing over some speech I’m making up as I go, practically. The next line will be: Really, I will miss you. Rhythmic, that repetition, with the Really set in-between—I’ll say that word a perfect see-saw, Jinx, one I-will-miss-you to the next. Ree. Lee. I will miss your one eye—which was my fault—and the way you would bug me for food when there already was food in the bowl because of your fuck-wittedness—and I will miss your tendency to vomit on things and to shit where I least wanted you to shit. Those’re the next lines. Of your eulogy, Lucy Jinx! Keep up, ya piss-ant cat! And then: You were my cat and I took you around with me and, often times, I ignored you because, historically, cats prefer it that way. Other times though, my friend, I would insist you upon me and treat you as though—foolish, I know—you had the capacity for reason. You. You! Jinx—you, Lucy Jinx—who would lick the tin lid of a tuna can for an hour straight, if you had things your own way, never figuring out that’s just your tongue that it tastes like by then! ‘Might as well eat your tongue’ I’d say to you.’ Remember that? Remember that, Lucy Jinx? I’d tell you It just tastes like your tongue, by now. Might as well eat your tongue! It’d be less tinny, at least. But maybe you liked tin, right? What the fuck did I ever know, Jinx?’

Lucy in thought of ‘How long are moments supposed to be?’

Lucy putting on her seatbelt.

Lucy in thought of ‘How sad should something make you if it isn’t making you sad?’

Lucy turning up then down then up the radio—such indecision not welcome, least of all tonight!

Lucy in thought of ‘Was that correct, was that how one’s supposed to bury a cat?’

Lucy depressing the car lighter because she’s come to really dig the car lighter, fells like she’s wasted her life in hardly ever using the thing.

Lucy in thought of ‘That was illegal—had I been caught, I’d be driving home with a ticket and a very dirty cat in a bag in my trunk!’

Lucy watching the receding taillights of a car moving on past her, rekindling her argument that if something is moving away in front of someone then one should say the lights, for example, are Preceding away—only if the car had passed her in the other direction, hence going away behind her, ought the term be Receding.

Lucy in thought of ‘It was right to lay the cat not in a bag and not in a box’—after all, she’d already domesticated it, so she could at least let its passing remain unspoiled, unhumaned, un-ceremony-nothing-to-do-with-ited.

Lucy lighting her smoke, the heater having lit the car wide with the overcooked damp of the tomb, this new crackle of tobacco coming across dog-wet and obnoxious, someone else’s heat all over a chair you want to relax in.

Lucy in thought of ‘Did putting the rock there, with that inscription, sully the naturalness …’ but concluding, correctly ‘… no no, cats don’t care about rocks and were more than clever enough to do without the alphabet—have as much use for words as jawbones do for corkscrews—cats felt feline-pity for bungler humans and their ungainly, meal-wormy words.’

Lucy putting the car in Drive, wondering, really, what the other options are even for or if there’s something odd about her because she never uses them—other, of course, than Reverse and Park.

Lucy in thought of ‘Is it okay to drive off, now—is it okay to ignore the worry I shouldn’t ignore?’

Lucy, more than a mile away, in a minute—such is the marvel of the horseless-age and the industrial need to be somewhere-else.

Lucy in thought of ‘If I went back, now—unless it were to claw at the earth, to weep myself into the botched soil and to coat my throat with mulch-tanged mucus—it’d be not only pointless but kind of pathetic.’

Lucy seeing the sign for the hotel—still called the Starlite Deluxe but now with the icon of a major franchise worked into the prissy-pants neon of the logo.

Lucy in thought of ‘Well, should I go claw the earth, weep myself into the botched soil—is that what people do, people other than me?’

Lucy, Lucy—she doesn’t have a cat anymore and looks precisely like Act-five Scene-one of Hamlet and, currently, we find her making her way across a hotel parking lot.

Previous to this, she’d sat in her car to enjoy singing along to a song, but that’s more compulsion than courtesy to the artist—even the cig she’d been sucking had been flicked out the window to cold anonymity unfinished while she’d belted the tune.

‘Unfinished, unfinished …’ she amuses herself with thinking ‘… is what happens when one has their citizenship to Finland revoked. Un-Finnish-ed’ she makes a fine-point of in a yuk-yuk tone of Ya get it?

In a perfect world, her confidence from this quip would make her bold with the hotel management, she’d tell them she’d like to have her act booked, nightly, in the lounge.

‘We have no lounge’ they’d say.

‘In one of the meeting rooms, then.’

‘We have no meeting rooms.’

‘In that case, outside by the pool—weather permitting.’

‘Deal—but we cannot pay you a cent.’

‘Nevermind, then’ Lucy would brusque and sternly dress them down about how they ought to’ve cut to that chase, off the bang!

The automatic door automatics.

Her odor mixes with the potpourri of a lobby-still-wet-from-its-nightly-mopping.

The young man at the desk seems chagrined—or, better word for him, Timoroused—at her approach.

‘I’m dirty because I just buried my cat out on the road—several miles back, not on your property.’

‘Shit. I’m sorry.’

‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. I stayed in this hotel the night I first met him—my cat—and I shall stay here, now.’

The lad doesn’t how to be appropriate or that there is, in fact, no way to be—which is to say: This situation is elevated of a need for such trifles.

‘We met when I ran him down with my car—nearly killed him—and I stayed in this hotel while he recuperated—and now I stay here after finally having finished him off. You see?’

‘I do’ the clerk good-natures, assuming that good-nature is called for, Lucy supposes.

‘If at all possible, I’d like the same room—not much has changed these seven, eight years …’ though she notes many changes, giving a quick glance around, or thinks she does ‘… so I imagine it’s still there.’

‘I can check’ the clerk says and he, to prove this, is already tacking at keys, producing that sound only hotel-desk keyboards ever seem to produce. ‘You might still be in our system …’ he says, eyes up to her ‘… should be …’ he adds, scratching the base of his head with his pen ‘… what’s your name?’

‘I am the poet, Lucy Jinx’ Lucy says, turning her back on him to lean to the counter the way such a pronouncement of Self necessitates one ought.

This is the room.

Best described as?

A lyric which Leonard Cohen would’ve scraped—sounded good for a second, then didn’t.

‘This isn’t, though, how the room was laid out before, no?’ Lucy’s internal, calm-toned biographer asks her.

No.

Totally different, in fact.

‘But the description you just gave still fits?’ the biographer follows up and then furthers ‘Or had you only meant that description to fit Now and not Then?’

‘Both times, both times’ Lucy says as she lumps herself higgledy-piggledy onto the mattress and turns on the television.

‘Is that what you did last time?’ the biographer presses.

‘It is’ Lucy explains, though she does hasten to add that she isn’t trying to recreate that night and would never be able to.

Biographer: ‘It’s just what you do when you first come into a hotel room—any hotel room?’

Lucy: ‘Yes. Because I’m the same as anyone else.’

This time, though, in the shower, Lucy’ll be washing off scents of cold, disheveled side-road and perspiration, while, last time, it’d been gore and snot and brain-scrambled fatigue.

Last time, she’d felt scabbied with guilt and a sense that she was the defloration of snow-not-yet-turned-crystal—while, this time, she’s just kind of spacy and interested in the differences between Then and Now.

Why in Hell is the room phone ringing?

Had it, in the Past, she would’ve ignored it and watched it from behind a rock with a spear, trembling and jaw shuddering, honest-to-God Cro-Magnon terror at the sight of the clang-a-lang-a-langing object—now, she just tears the receiver up from off cradle and goes ‘Hello, this is Lucy Jinx.’

‘This is the front desk—sorry—when you have a moment, could you pop back down to the desk?’

‘Certainly—though may I know why you’re proposing this, exactly?’

‘It’s probably my fault, but your card didn’t go through—I think I did some things out of order.’

‘But this cannot wait until tomorrow, you’re leading me to believe, as your job could be at hazard if it turns out I’ve snookered the room overnight, feeless?’

The clerk is so so sorry—he’s actually seven Sos sorry, if Lucy counted them right, tapping her finger to knee-top to each—but, yes, it needs to be tended to, straight away.

‘Word of advice then, my friend—for not all middle-of-the-night grave-diggers are as kind-blooded as I: Next time, don’t admit it might’ve been your fault! Make me—or whomsoever—think it was mine—or theirs.’

He’s grateful to her for understanding.

He only sounds a little bit like he might’ve just—if he hadn’t before—called the police on her.

Lucy, to the front desk clerk, once the matter with the bill had been settled: ‘I was thinking, earlier, about smell. And it reminded me how I once corrected a kid—a young kid—that steam can be seen because steam is something physical, but smells aren’t physical and, thus, cannot be seen. But I guess, if you’re small enough, smells are physical objects. Think on it: If we shrink-ray you down and down, eventually, in your eyes, a particle—that which a scent is composed of, a particle—will seem to rise on the haunches of its physicality and you’d be dwarfed by it! A single tenth-of-a-whiff of a sour candy, for example, would look big and flat as a mausoleum edifice! Admittedly, I tend to imagine particles—and therefore, if I kept getting smaller, each component particle-particle of a thing—as spherical, but that’s just my upbringing biasing me. I didn’t choose that—to see them that way. Societal, you know? Like I’ll betcha, nowadays, if someone born decades after me—if they think of particles, at all—would think of particles as Glowing. Glowing has become part of the societal unconscious for miniscule. I’d wager it has, at any rate. Me? No, my man—I see a particle as a solid, textureless, blot of object. With a distinct color! Though, I’m bound to say, never with the color one would naturally associate—when one is larger than the smell—with the smell. Armpit Sweat, a particle of it, wouldn’t be gym-towel grey, for example. It’d be fuchsia, probably—but not fuchsia-like-a-rash-reminds-you-of, no, just clean fuchsia, like a sign for cold drinks might be. Mark society, young man—though doing so won’t allow you to subvert it—and mark it with vigor and hawk claws. It’s no accident that eighteen-year-olds think they should only picture other eighteen-year-olds having sex and sixty-year-olds other sixty-year-olds. Society! Taboos! But not just taboos—commonalities. Familiarity is just a softer touch of taboo, you know? Familiarity preps the way to greedily disown certain thoughts and actions. Look at me, for example—to you, I’m Taboo. You to me? Utter Familiarity! There’s nothing new about you, young man, except you came after me and so have references that haven’t aged into vintage like mine’ve done. But I admit I’m jealous of you—for all of my Otherness, I’m jealous. And, having admitted it, I can explain no further. Not just jealous at your Youth or your Maleness or your Lack-of-anything-distinct. No. There aren’t terms cavernous enough for my jealousy. So we’ll just leave it at this: I am. You have a good night, kiddo.’

Good for Lucy!

She’s morphed into Johannes Nagel so absolutely none would suspect her of ever having been who she was!

In the elevator, she rubs her hands around in her hands and then claps them—she’s plain giddy with overlong emotion.

But, if she sorts it well, this high won’t crash, it’ll just coast her into sleep and then morning.

The News is on when she enters the room.

Tragedy!

A large building in another country has been engulfed in flame!

As buildings in other countries tend to engulf in!

Isn’t that interesting?

How Lucy thinks of this as run-of-the-mill?

Not not-sad, just run-of-the-mill.

It isn’t as though the News report says ‘For the first time, a building in another country has caught on fire!’

It isn’t ‘For the first time, anything bad has happened someplace else—can you believe this shit?’

Lucy’s biographer is quick to her mark, has her Dictaphone out—old fashioned, reel-to-reel, and with a countless-pig-tailish cord attaching the microphone to the device and this device-part to that device-part—and asks ‘Lucy, do you think it’s easier—or less surprising—when a war is said to be happening elsewhere or when a war breaks out at home?’

‘Elsewhere’ Lucy says, the biographer unable to hide her surprise. ‘At home, it doesn’t seem like a war, even—every day, you’d think Is that really the right word? Is that really what we mean by that? Because we cannot, by definition, remind ourselves of anything foreign.’

The President himself—Lucy had voted for the bloke—is talking about the matter.

The words ‘Thoughts and Prayers.’

Lucy likes that, always has.

He’s such an orator!

Like a pinball machine with impeccable manners!

She’s so glad she voted for him, Lucy thinks as she undresses, down to her undershirt and underpants, and while she flips through the directory to see about ordering a pizza.

Will Lucy answer the door for pizza, dressed like this?

Yes.

The President signs off, Lucy lowering the volume as commercials cue up.

This directory.

It takes guts, Lucy observes, to place an ad in it!

Roulette.

No idea what the other ads say when you’re placing yours.

Look at this!

Both places say Best deal in town!!! when one of them is so demonstrably the better deal than the other—even though it wasn’t so on purpose—the other cannot help but come off a liar.

Seven entire dollars difference between the two best, comparable deals!

Lucy orders from the more expensive place so they don’t have to feel bad.

She’s trying to come up with some clever way to tell them she picked them over their competitor when a prerecorded message comes on the line, explaining that they’re closed for the night.

Petulant teenager sigh, Lucy Jinx feels stood-up and walk-of-shames the other number in.

Dark except for the kids-firing-cap-guns of the television flicker, Lucy’s thoughts dwindle to hyper-specifics which will dwindle to sleep.

When could a memory be considered a flashback—how long since it happened before it gets that secondary-signifier?

Is remembering the cat, Lucy Jinx, that ugly first night of each other now flashback?

Or is that the dividing line—things before it are now old enough to not be called memory, really?

Memory is a thing that’s happened which is recalled as though a texture of the here-and-now.

Is that right, Lucy?

Versus, for example, a Recollection, which is just the bringing to mind of a fact.

‘I recall that I went to school such-a-where, but I recollect something my teacher once said.’

But to get caught up in the specifics—after thirty years—is to be in a Flashback.

While a Memory is something immediately connected to the current narrative.

‘Last year, that neighbor moved in—I remember it.’

This works, because it ties—loosely, but directly—to the status of Now.

What if you lived in the neighborhood for thirty-years and the same neighbor lived there?

Just checking: Lucy are you asleep, yet?

‘Nope. And to answer the question …’ Lucy out-louds, definite in her state-of-still-awake ‘… that might, at best, be a recollection—depending on the relationship with the neighbor—but is probably a flashback. Even if that neighbor, thirty years ago, did something that fundamentally changed you—say you witnessed them murder someone, just to be silly and late-night dramatic about it—after thirty years that’d count as a Flashback if you’re thinking about it. Important, no doubt—but more as background definition.’

The past is a broad-stroke and the older it gets the less need for the effect of the image.

All of this fine thought, though, is dishearteningly interrupted by a leg spasm—the variety particularly bitter and long-clinging, Lucy lumbering around the room like an elephant practicing a choreographed speech-made-while-dying.

The room is carbonated with the grey-blue, yellow, much-bluer black of the television and the shushing of Lucy’s teethed-in breath and her shoulder rubbing to her one ear to scratch its itch while she uses the fingers of the hand of that same arm to rub an itch on the other ear.

What a way to fall apart!

Lucy’s heard of middle-aged women for her whole life, how things happened to them, but no one had even obliquely hinted at all this!

She pours herself some tap-water and devours a room temperature slice of what’s-left-of-the-pizza, the two tastes mixing together in her half-asleep mouth about as tenderly as bone-saw to loved-one.

She’s awake now, pores leaking out pizzeria stale, skin feeling spongy as stiff crust that’d be greasy-moist if chewed.

Sweating.

The dream had been about the cat.

In the dream, she’d been cutting off his whiskers.

But she’d only been six-years-old.

And the cat could talk and had been begging ‘No don’t!’

And she’d been six-years-old and in her six-year-old cruelty had just mocked the broken English that was all the cat could manage, as though its plea was worth ignoring on the strength of such technicality.

The cat hadn’t reacted in pain.

The whiskers had severed, not soft, not hard—something between the snip sound of a barber’s sheer and the snap of a single dry stick of spaghetti.

‘Did it hurt?’ she’d asked—her grown-up voice, in the dream she’d become bodiless, the image just an in-close of the cat like from a documentary of it made ages ago.

The cat had both eyes.

It was busy licking ants off its claws.

Its stub-whiskers seemed like roadside attractions and like if one touched them they’d be porcupine, cactus, unforgiving little sumbitches.

But now, Lucy’s awake.

And something lingers from the dream so she’s on guard: ‘Don’t be so certain you’re not still dreaming.’

Terrors of arms in eelish coils under the bed, conspiring to slather her every inch with the feeling of arms-have-crawled-on-me.

Lucy sits up and tries to let the television balm her.

Volume up and the rhythms of a sitcom that still feels contemporary to her but is now really quite old, wedged hard into syndication because nothing else has aged just precisely to its ripeness.

‘Poor little show—you were funny’ Lucy says and she touches the television screen—in her imagination, only, in reality just dusting the air in front of her—like it’s a single tear from a bashful kindergartner’s cheek.

‘We used to laugh’ Lucy continues.

And she can almost feel the feelinglessness of the image of those dull blades slicing the cat’s whisker-flesh.

This is a feeling she hasn’t felt since—well, how about that, Lucy!—she was probably six.

Those old faceless nightmares she’d wake from.

Those ‘sleeps-that-feel-real’ as she’d call them to her father before he’d hug her and say ‘I had those when I was young, too.’

‘I had those when I was young, too’ Lucy says now.

Yes.

Yes.

This is what missing the cat will feel like.

Yes.

You knew it’d be something.

It’ll be this: The nightmare a six-year-old could only talk about by calling sleep real.

‘THIS MORNING’S SKY IS AN endless typo of crows.’

Good line.

Lucy marks it.

There, on her dashboard, is the little microphone she keeps—microcassette, none of the disaster of when she’d once tried to do this with a digital do-dad.

‘However …’ she explains to the recording ‘… I’m changing it to this: Today’s sky was an endless typo of crows.’

Taps button, the recorder shutting off.

This isn’t a poetical jaunt, keep in mind—that line was accidental. Brought on by observing the sky, the sky overturned, a gallon with milk glug-glug-glugging from it—this spilling of birds, a peppershaker—the sky a spill sky-long and enough to blot bold the black of a treeline’s silhouette.

Birds and birds and birds—whole birds of them, she thinks.

Taps the button on: ‘This isn’t good for a poem, but I like the line—Birds and birds and birds, whole birds of them. Or maybe it’s good for a poem. That’s for time to find out. Nevermind.’

Taps the recorder off, again.

And on Lucy’s mind isn’t the cat.

That’s a tar settled to her dreams, a new blockage in the contours of her brain—even here, passing by the spot with the marker, she just nods a brief Hello.

Are we to judge Lucy?

Think she’s lacking?

Think she, as compared to another, knows not how to grieve?

Maybe.

And an examination would find a cigarette in her mouth and her hair still soft with hotel conditioner and her teeth and the gums up under her lips still slightly gritty from toothpaste not brushed around enough, rinsed firm enough, spit gone enough.

And an examination finds her happy and thinking how she should do everything in her power to make it official that to heighten the degree of a curse-word one should up the first letter.

Bitch is well and good, but rather than raising one’s voice to show degree-of-venom just say Citch.

And onward to Ditch.

Skip the vowels, maybe.

Fitch.

Gitch.

‘You Jucking Zitch!’ she ha-has, just to give an example of how fun mixtures of core and modifier might work.

Of course, there’re tricky ones—but they’re just all the more fun, cards down.

Bhore might seem, by default, to be a rather soft version of something—but, really, it’d be five ticks up from its mildest form.

Likewise, Vhore could seem one-step-backward from the basic-epithet but is really the thing pushed to its hilt!

This technique, Lucy feels, should be easy enough to adopt, even by the shirt-sleeve illiterates—and those who treasure language should laud it as the greatest victory since the apostrophe!

That’s where we find Lucy Jinx, this morning.

Untroubled, headlong, a word-cluttered mess.

Now, here’s Lucy: Miles away from hotel and from cat-grave. Idling along with this stale plip of traffic until she can finagle her way into the sloping-to-form turning lane, get herself into the parking lot of this local franchise fast-food place called Magpies.

Young Pastor Mitchell, as she calls him, is on shift—she can see this, plain as anyone could, from his parked car being right over there, acned with sun-faded, lizard-scaled, and flaking bumper stickers for Rancid, The Buzzcocks, Bikini Kill, The Loverboys, and The Pawking Metahs.

She finishes out her smoke without the engine or radio running and wriggles with her no-matter-how-many-times-this-has-gone-fine-it-doesn’t-matter-it-could-still-all-go-wrong nerves.

Next: We discover Lucy seated at the table outside the restrooms, around the corner from the counter where she’d purchased her sausage-muffin and coffee, a store-length from the at-this-hour unpopulated Playnet Kidz area—this one done up like outer-space vehicles and escapades, Lucy appreciative of the whimsical addition of the alien-craft shaped letter Y in the signage—already having made a proper held-stare and a head-nod to Mitchell as he collected trays from the bins by the fountain drinks.

Thinking it best not to overload him—dayshift and impromptu—Lucy settles on twenty-dollars-worth, folding the bill into the napkin she leaves at the ready.

The Procedure goes as thus: Mitchell makes his approach, as though toward the Men’s Room, Lucy stands and sets the napkin-with-twenty on top of the trashcan, returns to her seat, Mitchell takes the napkin before he goes into the can, and Lucy waits—waits, waits not very long—and out Mitchell comes, Lucy then standing, with tray, briefly lingering in front of Mitchell so he can drop the empty Push-Pop candy container onto her tray before going to bus her table, Lucy getting rid of her trash at the proper receptacle and simultaneous palming the Push-Pop, exiting right out that door.

Now, whether everyone does the exact same dance with Young Pastor Mitchell or whether these steps are unique to Lucy, Lucy doesn’t know.

Nor does she know how many clients the delinquent has in his Rolodex.

Nor if he’ll grass on her to save his own skin when he’s eventually, certainly, knicked.

But she pulls out of the lot with a fine two nuggets of mellow-scented marijuana—and had even, once, been gifted an extra.

‘Like a Loyalty Card perk’ Mitchell had said, cryptically, that time, leaving Lucy with no idea how many transactions, exactly, it took to get the bonus, or if it was a one-time thing, or if it was his way of showing keenness on touring her interior.

Now: Lucy drives with her skin the pickle taste of paranoia.

She never feels better, after a buy, until she crosses the sign that says Saulsbury Township, though the sign signifies nothing at all to do with her.

Ah—and here is home. Across the lot from, of all things, a Hernando’s Total. It was the sight of this shop which’d turned the final screw on Lucy’s choice of abode—here she resides, in the well-weathered Meadow Wind Eves, third floor up, a room right at the top of the stairwell, allowing her endless music from all hours’ footsteps, smoker’s coughs, laundry sighs, grocery-bag rustles, and cellphone chat excerpts—this all decided well before she knew how these neo-brand Hernando’s shops were diaper-rashed across the whole area.

Indeed, even a standard Hernando’s would have sub-signs affixed, assuring all comers Including Hernando’s Total! the difference between the two Hernando’s being—Lucy’d investigated thoroughly—that, in a proper Hernando’s, the Total section was just the dimmer-lit, higher-priced, micro store—freezers and all—tucked to one corner—where the common shoppers would only venture by accident—while the Total store, standalone, was just a building the size of twice that area and with only two stunted-sized Checkout lanes the lines of which were always snaked down the Produce aisle, around down the aisle with the high-reaching self-serve bins of various granolas and nuts-mixed-with-raisins, nuts-mixed-with-cranberries type things.

Lucy shops there.

She has a Points Card, in fact, though has no idea what the points accrue toward—Points, maybe, just meant to make her feel proud, as on printed receipts the number is always followed by three exclamation points and a Way to Go, You!

Conspicuously absent, to her honest lament, is Hernando’s Highlights.

Poor Lucy—with her plagiarisms now resigned to obscurity—had a manager confirm how they ‘remembered that thing’ but it’d stopped ‘being around’ even before the Totals had spawned.

Ah well.

And here, at the second-floor as she’s climbing to home, is the door behind which is That Woman.

That Woman, That Woman—who is she?

Lucy stares at the different-grey of That Woman’s door, trying, as always, to, perhaps by lucky glance, get a staying impression as to ‘Is it older-grey or newer-grey?’ always feeling butterfly-flush when she thinks she might be observed staring, immediately hurrying along on her way.

Lucy …’ says a man she knows is named Kyle—though she never feels she’s remembering that right—as he approaches with two dogs who tug their leashes toward Lucy as though she’d given them a hand-job after class, once—Kyle tugs the leashes and the dogs heel, though flip-flop to this side of their faces and that go their tongues, these at a perpetual, grinning pant—‘… I was wondering if I could ask you for a favor.’

‘What’s up?’

‘I have a date’ Kyle slowlys, familiarlies, dot-dot-dotting the end in a music of shucks-I’m-just-so-pathetic, Lucy picking up the melody with ‘And it ain’t to the point she knows you’ve got sucklings?’

‘Thank you …’ Kyle says, knowing the tone of her voice is Lucy’s assent and, as the dogs sniff her in passing, he says ‘… Wednesday, six—overnight?’ the last word said imploringly, blessed-are-the-meek, Lucy fitting her key to her lock and over-her-shouldering ‘Yeah yeah—happy whoring, man, I got yer back.’

Altar-like—this is the inside, immediate, of Lucy’s apartment door: A mirror, small, not even enough to see her face-in-full within, and square, as well—a microscope slide of her which she looks at, lean-in-lean-out—and, above this mirror, quite on purpose—high enough to have to crane her neck proper ceilingward to regard—is the framed Cat Poem, beneath-placarded with the words Never Forget.

True enough, Lucy doesn’t always look up at the thing upon entry and exit—she hadn’t forgotten it’s there, but it isn’t there beyond the ceremony of putting-it-there-seemed-important.

As in to say: Life having proceeded past Move-In date, most of her apartment—this symbolic gimmick included—is more-or-less haphazard, nothing beyond the result of having to share nothing and to share that with nobody—not space, food, air, or decorum.

Shrug out of your coat, Lucy.

Over here goes your sweater.

And, while you’re at it, your t-shirt.

Her bra is left on the sofa-back and, itching the slick of her underbreasts, Lucy enters the kitchen and flings her shoes living-roomward, cracking her cold-brittle toes in the moist of her socks.

The apartment heat, this time of year, stays on enough to allow that the apartment feels always like being held in the glazed stare of a man at the end of a train-car moving his hands, peculiarly arhythmical, within his tight trouser pocket.

Paper plates only, but set in the cupboard where real-world dishes might go.

Even Styrofoam cups for the coffee—her kitchen reeks of the breakroom of a place you can’t believe you applied for a job in!

Mounds of notebooks there, and mounds there, and a few there.

And, as Lucy moves into her bedroom, flaps on the light, the wall is shown to be measled with poetry she’s magic-markered around. No method to what she writes on the wall or where—and the scribbles by the bed are in regular pen, a lot of times not read-backable when she wakes, her habits being so that she’s always scratching that wall in the dark, not realizing how sometimes she’s just dusting off the plaster, sometimes the pen is leaking, and sometimes, quite beautifully, every third letter forms exquisite and perfectly legible, nothing of the in-between letters, a stutterer’s dyslexic alphabet written in substitution-code.

It’s clear that she eats—now completely nude, except old baggy lounge-shorts, and in her kitchen, again—only these microwaveable meals—a discount brand she discovered at the gas station just outside her workplace in the town one-county-over—and drinks only coffee, water, and from-the-bottle tugs of wine, from time-to-time.

The refrigerator top is graveyarded with old bottles, molds growing in their bases enough to make them seem moth-speckled.

She opens a cabinet with her toes, coughs inelegantly, feeling her belly holiday-jelly, reaching across for a fork and a take-away packet of ketchup from inside it.

Analog-old answering-machine, bought at a swap-meet in a town she drove through two years ago—she cannot look at it without remembering the pride of those parents watching their porky fourth-graders guzzle down neighbor-made pies for neighbor-donated prizes.

That’d been an education, eh Jinx?

Yep, that’s who you dwell amongst, now.

Oh the elation when one of the plumpers raised hands like a tour-de-France champeen and even people not actively spectating had burst uproariously into galvanized, hive-minded euphoria at the victory!

Lucy would’ve bought the answering-machine, anyway, but, even if she hadn’t wanted the thing, just the comic timing of her ‘I’ll take this’ the instant the ruckus wore down would’ve necessitated the purchase.

To complete the installation of the machine, Lucy had used somebody’s Long-Distance Funky Mix Tape cassette—loving that, in brackets after Long-Distance, was the notation 5-7 km—which she’d purchased along with some old cassette of Monty Python she hadn’t heard since her teenage days—and also the soundtracks to Ghostbusters, Top Gun, Three Men and a Baby, and a VHS copy of Mr. Mom had come home with her.

More important: What sort of messages is Lucy Jinx finding on her machine today?

‘Hi Lucy—Sylvia wants to do the last Friday, next month—but if you really, really, really insist, we can leave it for the twenty-second. Or try to. I’m with you, but Sylvia draws more water, so you’ll have to let me know. I know you don’t care—but I want you there, if that makes a difference. Sorry. They suck and so I suck by dint of association. Hugs, high-fives, and call me.’

That was one.

Here’s the next.

‘Ms. Jinx, I just wanted to touch base since you didn’t show up last week and haven’t returned a call. Benefit of the doubt, always, but unless you get back to me today, we’ll have to take your resume out of circulation. I hope everything’s okay—and if you’ve just been indisposed and were unable to call, we can still get you in for training with Hatfield Group, if you want. I need to know, today. Office number is the same. Me, direct, is press Five-five.’

Note: A slight tingle runs up Lucy at so many uses of five at the end of messages.

Technically, that’s three utterances of Five between two messages and so vicious unluck—but she’s softening the tremor by noting how one of them was a Fives and the other two went together so really cannot count as two any more than five fifty-five could count as three-in-one-go.

Next message: ‘Oh you cursed goose, you! Looking forward to heckling you tonight …’ here a staticy, broken-cartoon Bwahaha! ‘… and I’ll spend the entire Reading trying to see your panty lines! Keep that in mind!’

Grinning, Lucy corrects to the air, as the tape churns out the next message ‘It’s not a Reading, you dolt—I’ve told you that more than nine times.’

Still patting her elbows into her thick sides, playing with the sensation of freshly-shaved underarms—still-wet ribs in trickles to go with them—Lucy yawns and dials Mathilda, whose quirk of answering calls without any word of greeting Lucy’s long grown accustomed to, right-ins with the business of ‘Hey Math—got a sec to see if any e-mails came in? Just from that one broad, really—but let me know if anything’s there. Including the Spam porn-invites, per usual.’

‘But of course, you horse’s mane, but of course.’

Mathilda isn’t one for small-talk when having to perform a task, so Lucy sprinkles some of her fresh bud into the glass bowl she swiped from that backpack at that indie book fair, wondering if she has time to take a hit while Mathilda’s calcified computer kicks into gear.

Finally she just says ‘Don’t talk for a sec—I’m just taking a hit of this.’

No reply, but with this bitch there never is.

Flicker-flick-lit.

Thumb over hole.

Thumb away and in-suck—pins-and-needles, took in way way too much heat there, Lucy!—the count of twelve held and breathe out.

‘I take it you’ve made another accomplishment’ Mathilda chimes in now, Lucy picturing her puggishly little holier-than-thou expression.

‘I take it I have an e-mail informing me that that Nobel to Coetzee was just a typographical mistake, after all?’

‘Yes, yes …’ Mathilda indulges ‘… you have exactly that. But nothing from your broad.’

‘Nothing from the broad!?’

‘Sorry.’

‘Shit, Times-Table—didn’t I tell you about this broad?’

‘You told me, Jinx-poo, you told me about this broad.’

‘Jinxy-poo?’ Lucy as-though-hardly-believing-her-ears.

‘You’re not as easy to do nicknames for as I am!’

‘I suppose that’s true. Remember when I called you Multiplicative Property of Zero for a whole month?’

‘Did you do that, Jinxy-poo? I don’t remember that. Sounds like something someone as hilarious as you would do, though.’

‘Lighten the fuck up, Base-six—and hold on, I’m taking another hit, that last one was the pits.’

Mathilda silences and offers no glib commentary when, this time, Lucy exhales smooth and jumps right back into the chat.

‘But didn’t I tell you about that broad—She’s full of it I’d said! I think. Didn’t I just say that very thing?’

‘You told me never to trust broads, yes. Then started calling me thrice-per-day to see if she’d e-mailed you.’

‘Well—has she?’

‘Nope.’

‘Exactly! Do you think I miswrote my e-mail? Or that she doesn’t know what that At symbol means?’

Mathilda does her time-to-get-off-the-phone good natured tone and says ‘I’d never put anything past a broad.’

‘Yeah fine …’ Lucy says ‘… I get the drift’ and hangs up.

Let’s keep in mind, though, that Lucy’s very much to-the-matter-at-hand—when there’s business needs tended to, she tends!

As such, look: She hefts to her writing desk one of the three cardboard boxes in which are contained volumes of her collection The Patron Saint of Choking To Death which she, of course, sub-titled poems by Lucy Jinx volume three.

This box is the lighter of the two, down to the sound of a cup scrapping the bottom. The three copies from it she tosses to the desk where they land with an effeminate smack.

Mouse grey, matte-finish cover—darker at its corners, though only just subtly. Pea-soup green letters—the title all lowercase but larger than the sub-title, the sub-title all capital and three whole shades lighter, as though maybe not supposed to be there but an eraser didn’t quite work.

She adores this volume!

But fish-dead, all alone, those three copies there make her feel the book is vulnerable and she wishes she’d reordered some copies of her other volumes of work to lay out wide on the table beside them.

This is contra her position, of course, and contra the arrogant mystique of it all.

As she always does, she opens the volume and grins at the misspelling—bang-bang right there!—Table of Cotents.

Like each time, for a moment, it doesn’t seem a mistake.

Which is exactly how the mistake had slipped through!

The various commas and the one ridiculous stanza break in The Sovereignty of Her Half-Penny Mouth wouldn’t be noticed even if anyone read the things with a critical eye, so Lucy’s conditioned herself to think of these as how those poems actually go.

Unless she’s ever interviewed by Bill Moyers—in that case, she’ll make charming hay of the error, go on about how scatterbrained she is and so impatient, claim something about how she sees the printed volume as live-performance, something something something ‘And anyway, it makes me seem mortal.’

Oh how Bill Moyers will chuckle!

‘Table of Cotents’ she scoffs.

But it bugs her.

It does.

She’s lain extra-long in the bath trying to think up some clever way to make someone who points it out seem like the true fool for doing so, for missing something subtle.

Like: Didn’t they notice such-and-such in such-and-such poem—say, for example, in Dawns Who Mourn Horses—which completely, cleverly justifies the front-matter misspelling, makes it a special wink to those in the know!?

The best she’s ever come up with, though, is to say ‘It’s how I spelled it in the first thing I wrote when I was six—and since this volume is based on dredging up my youth, it seemed only proper, even if only I ever know it was on purpose.’

See here: Lucy’s repeating this aloud—lying to herself a lie she’ll never need to tell anyway just to have told it.

Lucy decides to bring the entire box. She’ll cover the table in front of her. An act of passive intimidation!

Why she lets herself get caught up in any preparation at all is just for appearances with whichever store.

And since this is a national chain, and because it’d seemed a real favor to get her a table—on a weekday evening, though it may be—and since they’d actually put up a few signs advertising how she’d be there—and its marked on the Events Calendar pegged on the corkboard by the toilets and in the Newsletter which they sometimes put into customer’s bags—she ought to doll it up a bit.

‘I’ll even wear lipstick …’ she says, then—because she won’t and doesn’t want this to count as an unkept promise—immediately also says ‘I mean chap-stick—I just mean I won’t have, you know, scabby lips or anything.’

Opening the bedroom closet, she now manages to find the poster-on-canvas she’d once had made up for a shared table at a festival.

What an odd little relic!

On it appears just her face, as though done in charcoal with highlights of beige.

But it’s kind of classy.

Might as well bring it along.

That is—come on, Lucy, think things through—if she can think of a way to mount it.

As it is—look at the thing!—it doesn’t even unroll all the way!

Eyeballing it, she figures the cheap clip-frame to the reproduction poster for Fitzcaraldo she has leaned to the wall outside of the bathroom—usually, as it is now, mostly obscured by the high pile of soiled laundry—would work.

Reality: She’d have to trim the canvas-dealie a bit.

Frustration.

But the edge gets taken off by another toke from her bowl.

Recentered: What?

Having to use scissors a quick minute is enough to throw her off of a task?

Think how splendid you’ll look sitting there, Lucy!

How confused-but-awe-inspired milling customers who don’t even know how to spell Poetry will be by the sight of you stationed underneath your own larger-than-life portraiture, a poker spread of books with your name on them in front of you!

In fact, Lucy, you should commission a new sign!

On tin!

And invest in a music stand or a tripod!

‘Razzle dazzle and carnival-bark and whooping-cough or whatever’ she says, scissors at the ready, not trusting herself in the slightest.

Just as abruptly she figures ‘Bah—fuck it.’

What’s she supposed to do?

Look a right yutz there, a pile of books and her picture, people in line to buy coffee and black-and-white cookies giving her the hairy eyeball and understanding, to the micron, how much she ought to be pitied?

Here’s Lucy Jinx’s shelf.

The one shelf on the overall bookshelf—that is to say: The one row of the shelf, but which she likes to call a shelf-in-itself, knowing full well it’s just a part-of-a-shelf—which she dedicates to her own offerings.

The first two volumes of her collected poetry.

Volume One: An Affair in the Rickety Autumn.

Volume Two: Salamander Debts.

Five copies of each—well, seven, counting the two copies each of the alternate-cover versions of the titles.

And a hardcopy—the only one in existence!—of the combined volume.

My Parisian Charlatan: Collected Verse.

Note: Lucy regrets that title.

She likes the phrase, but it’s such a minor, off little line in an overall unimportant poem that it’s drawn from—not worth the titular spot, not by a length!

Grin is gaslight jilted / so spending one night as a whore / piles of fist over fist over fist-over-fist / you make good, my Parisian charlatan.

Added to which: Collected volumes should always just be called Collected Poems—no other title!

Added to which: Also, if she was going to call it after a line, she obviously should’ve gone with the sour morning’s broke paw.

Moving on: A collection of saddle-stitched, pulped paper, single poems. She’d had some help with layout from that chap—whatever his name was—but never distributed them as she’d so enthusiastically planned to.

Four different chapbooks, all made at the same time and given the appearance of a series—their covers are reproduction maps of various cities for the top two-thirds, then different solid colors for the bottom one-third, her name and the titles Opal, Prune, Pickpocket, and Gallowsgirl.

One of those had won her a few fans—Gallowsgirl—but that’d gone nowhere.

Here are the three Anthologies she has something in—one of the trio nothing but some pure bunk from some sneaky-Pete small press counting on authors to purchase copies, one a contest win which she’d had to enter under another name because it was only open to residents of Georgia, one she’s actually proud of and had even gone out-of-state to the publication party for.

Also: The half-dozen print journals—each and every one of ‘em now either defunct or else the only issue of them to ever come out.

The folder, there, contains print-outs from the two-dozen online journals that’ve displayed her work—she refuses to call online work Published—and a photograph of when she, completely inexplicable, found a line she’d written graffitoed on the side of a newspaper machine: Tell me your books, tongueless! Mire your soul in sewn spine!

Why would someone be knocking on her door?

And just now, as she guiltily takes a last little toke—too much for driving, Lucy, Jesus come on!

Stiff as a spider that might not be dead she goes—still as something that might just be a shadow and your glasses aren’t on.

Again: Someone knocks on her door.

Delivery man her codgery mind is able to proffer, the idea spit out along with a bit of unchewed corn and burping spittle into the waiting hand of an underpaid nurse.

‘Delivery man?’ she internally scoffs, doing her best to not giggle because it’d be a high-note to a slap-pitched Haw! if she did.

Explain how it’d be a delivery man, nitwit!

More knocking.

More insistent.

Well, surely someone can smell her in here smoking up!

‘Why’re they only just now doing something about it!?’ isn’t a defense that’ll hold up in court!

They could have the police on their way, right this very minute!

But wait, she reasons—yes, yes, you’re right, Lucy—the police cannot break down the door because someone maybe smells pot!

Not in this hemisphere, they can’t!

All she has to do is hide out in here until the scent is gone or until her high subsides and she’s in the clear.

Right?

Oh God, this is the sort of problem a fifteen-year-old with a mildly bad upbringing has to deal with—a bit beneath the station of someone of the artistic stature of Lucy Jinx!

‘Though, it’s funny at the same time’ she admits, and now is laying on the sofa, all bones tense with keep-the-hysterics-in, the laughter allowed no further than the very tip of her skin, a massage-roller feel of amusement exhausting her and willing her to burst.

Well, whoever it was must be gone by now.

Or now.

Or now.

Definitely by now.

Lucy opens the door and has a peek down the corridor.

Not a thing.

Nor a one.

No note taped to the door or any package left.

And she strains to hear if, maybe, there’re other doors being knocked on or some mysterious shufflings on the stairs.

There’s always some part of the world nosing around her, is all.

That’s how she steels herself while re-chaining the door.

Then: Back to the sofa.

Because she still has hours to burn until she has to get on the road.

The apartment silences around her—even the click of the unmoving dial-fashion clock above the stove seeming to be wearing extra socks and taking as-long-strides-as-possible to keep everything calm.

This is what the very center of a tuft of dropped cotton must feel like.

This is the life of the crumb that the ants overlooked.

BB. WESTMORE BOOKS—THERE IT is.

Look upon it, ye mortals, and tremble!

The needless gigantism of its façade—how many stories tall does it appear, three, four even?—plopped atop the no-bigger-than-anywhere-else interior—spacious-wide lengths between shelves and boasting an entire section for blank journals, postcards, tote-bags, a café, and a magazine-wall taking up one whole store-length curve, a Children’s Books section that has a community-theatre-stage-sized area of play-tables and seats that look like toadstools to encourage younglings’ imaginations or something.

Thrill at it!

Vast and seeming to suck wind from the expansive cracked-and-tar-stitched pavement of the parking lot.

Camera pans around to reveal, equally monolithic, the cold high front of The Pet Store, a solid quarter-mile of lot between the two Gargantuas.

This patch of trees?

What could the meaning of them be, other than keeping this place obscured from the prying eyes of the Interstate’s on-and-off-ramp?

Abandoned shopping carts—from The Pet Store—tipped in the postures of flood victims, an ever-present scent of feces from squatters who, maybe, dwell there in the scraggle of trunks, fallen leaves, milkweed, and illegal dumping, nothing to pass their time with but peering out, urinating, and leaving cakes of waste to sully their own footprints with.

Quite a place, this!

The personality one associates with Art, certainly!

Note also: Those black windows?

They seem to be a part of the bookstore, yes?

And what of that blacked-out door—surely some secondary-entrance or exit, the backway out of the employee-only area in case of fire?

No, no.

Come the winter holidays—soon, soon in fact—and the truth will be revealed that this—which seems to suggest a wide girth to the bookstore—is really empty space, waiting to be chocked full with Halloween costumes or fake Christmas trees, cardboard turkeys and pilgrim-hats in shabby felt—anything that can be hucked for a few bucks to those who feel festivities must be frivolous to be worth the time.

BB. Westmore Books—Lording over the world with its back turned, aloof.

The whole positioning of this place, on driving approach, is the epitome of standoffish—‘I don’t need you, and if you come, when you go I’ll forget you, straight away.’

No signage even, either on the road or affixed to the rear of the structure—which is all a driver can see—identifies it as habitable—its backside is sandy-brick in faded blue and red paint, two green doors, and five dumpsters which face the commuters, the ass it sneers at the world—and the paltry mall, across the street—suffering death throes that more and more denizens of the area ignore—is getting the brunt of its scoffing.

Lucy knows bookstores the way most recall people, from hip-high, looking up on their fifth or sixth birthdays.

Moreso than libraries, even, though this is something she’s loathe to admit.

From bookstores her teeth were cut to literature.

From bookstores and the sections of grocery-stores with magazines, stationary, Get-Well cards, and gift-wrapping bric-a-brac.

Draw a picture of her life?

She’d draw what it feels like to stand in a bookstore aisle, leafing through something-at-random after straining her disappointed eyes for an empty hour in looking for something-better—what it feels like to stand there, knowing she’ll not be disturbed, watching shoppers who, all of them, know better why they’re there than she does why she is.

Those three prepubescent girls, for example?

Lucy knows they’re not sitting, huddled to each other like tossed-aside backpacks, in the Graphic Novel section because they’re mere driftwood, no idea what they want to be doing, aloosed into the roiling loiter that Lucy so often found herself in when a young girl—no, no, those girls came here to read Graphic Novels, do it all the time, this is a treehouse, a closed closet, a blanket overhead, their mixed warming breaths colored flashlight!

Or that twenty-year-old, hair thick as a comb, looking far too T.S. Eliotted in his clean suit with his aftershaved chin—that young-man-carbuncular-for-his-century, pomping his new kind of posturing, the lonely froufrou to him—that snappy lad is reading a biography of the current Pope with no irony and no honest heart of believer to him!

Lucy sees.

She knows.

Interchangeably unique, the bookstore lot.

The girl in specific-glasses and just-so-polka-dotted blouse, working the Music section, reading the synopsis of everything she price-stickers in order to win at trivia later—Lucy knows her, a million times, each time, each girl, each Her, dissimilarly exactly the same.

How about him?

That guy?

No longer even only-just-thirty in his beard and his over-obvious neck, prouder of how he jogs every day than of his PhD?

Him?

He has theories on all things political but only has them to conjure an excuse to bring up his same favorite record to everyone at whichever party he’s attending as though only, just then, recalling it for the first time in ages.

He carries the newest books around—see? like he already owns them, dustjacket-flaps used as bookmarks pinned by random pages!—and has read every blurb on the covers nine times.

And Lucy can see herself in all of them—where she touches, connects, overlaps.

That one she once married and that one met someone she’d lied to and that one is her-in-four-years and that one her-in-twenty—and the ones not-there-for-books are her hoping to be seen while sneaking past unseen.

The man who she’d arranged things with was squirrelish in his behavior, seemed to have to stop every third sentence, look around, move a pace or two, and then touch at something before continuing with his Hellos, giving her a pointless—Lucy and he remaining stationary, mind you, he just gesticulating hither and nigh—tour of the store, and going over the timetable for her Event.

He’s helpful though, the man—he’s found her a tablecloth to class up the semi-long table he’d unfolded the legs of himself, then he’d discovered a