..>> washed away <<..

it's been a hard days night... more from chapter 3.

Stacey walked down the road, clothes clinging to her like a second skin, heavy and bearing down on her delicate frame.
The rain had started halfway thru her train ride home and was getting heavier. Fat droplets flung themselves towards the earth’s face, kamikaze diamonds dancing their way to molten puddles.
As she made her way down the vacant street she noticed the flickering of bat’s wings overhead. She looked up and saw the bantam figures darting thru the dulling glare of the street lights, sickly orange auras overhead. Squinting thru acid tears, she thought she saw a silhouette wrapping its way around the street lights poles and up to the sky which was now canopied by clouds.
Then the soggy girl, the girl who stood under imaginary halos pushed her head upwards and let the rain dance over her face, and she smiled at the notion that these particular heavenly tears, fat and acidic and rubberized, could wash away the night’s events and would make her pure of heart again.
Headlights sliced thru the night and roused her from her introspection. The fat metal body drove past without thought, the rotation of pitted wheels, a thousand oblivious turns per minute. The car churned forward and the rain descended upon the smooth line of the window screen.

When she got home, the rain finally stopped and a damp, salty residue was left hanging in the air. She made her way upstairs to her room, full of candles and books and golden brown feathers, of fairy wings hanging on widows and amber rose soaps. She peeled the shirt from her torso and stepped out of her fallen pants and hoped straight into a warm shower. Her lavender shampoo helped to form her hair into a soapy Mohawk and vanilla bean conditioner created an oil slick down her legs. There she stood, alabaster goddess, skin tingling from the new temperature. The bathroom light extended into the glass shower like creepers making her skin luminous and she sat down while the water beat warm rhythms on her spine. All the while replaying her conversations with Matt over and over, seeking ecstasies in memories.

When she was growing up, no one ever understood Stacey Larson. How her hair was seemingly well groomed and knotted at the same time, how she looked at everything and everyone with excruciating exactness. Why, when other children were out socializing in large groups and running like buffalo herds thru the mall, she chose to be home alone, nose buried in books and head in the silvery clouds. While her piers were at the local pool, she was collecting sea glass and urchin casings and jumping thru the peaking waves. And the answer was simple really. While most people limited themselves with mechanical realism, Stacey chose to live with a complex sensibility. She saw pretty words and portraits where others saw only graffiti, infinite beauty when there was none to be seen. She was an outcast to everyone but herself. And even now at 17 she was continually changing, becoming herself. Free and trapped within her ever mutating image.