Pisaries Creator

The stupid traffic. I hate this city. I can’t stand it.

It’s gotten worse. It’s tried to swallow me whole.

I watched from afar how he played her like a fiddle. The first time he held the bow as if it were a knife and slid it across the strings with such aggressiveness you were thinking he was killing her with each movement.

A month later he was plucking her one string at a time until the rhythm became predictable. This time it was a guitar. Faster and faster, he moved his fingers over the width of the neck, experimenting with chords, playing with her emotions, making her fall to her knees and weep.  

My mouth is mega dry, like a desert that hasn’t had rain in months. My eyes have stopped seeing what’s in front of me. I continue to hear the insignificant sounds around me. Call them crickets or cicadas. They are annoying.

The water doesn’t help anymore. Get me some soda, please. Okay, two of them. One for later.  

I think about death. I imagine I die a horri0ble death: a raging fire or held underwater by a hand the size of a dinner plate. My mind hops from one image to the next. A huge Australian spider jumping on the top of my head. I don’t have a jar big enough to put it in. There is nothing to tame this beast. He doesn’t want to be civilized, caught in the trap.

I think about my appearance. My rotten teeth. My ugly nails. My thinning hair. My blood shot eyes. My oily forehead. I can’t stand to look at myself naked. However, I have seen other naked people, and it didn’t bother me.

Should I say something to him?

He hasn’t spoken since the time I said hello. He doesn’t know the pain she’s in, from head to toe. She conceals it well. He thinks she’s in tip top shape from twenty years ago.

He’s fooling himself if he thinks he’s buying my silence with his white lies. He has told them many times and should be punished. I was not given the power to decide how he should live.

He turns his ear to me and leans closer.

“I need you to do something for me,” I say. “No one can know about this.”

He nods.

“I’m serious. This city can’t know this came from me,” I tell him.

“Understood.”

“I don’t think you do.”

He cuts me off before I can say more with his hand. “The city has you by the throat. I get it. You’re still perplexed why Cubans don’t move away from Miami and Mexicans stick to California. You’re still sour about our last meeting.”

Now it’s my turn to engage in fakery. I nod even though I don’t give a crap about either state. I think both are worthless. Both governors think they are better than everyone else. What I want to ask him is how he still has janky teeth in his mouth with his money? You’d think he would want to distance himself from the stereotype of a British fellow with horrible teeth.

“There’s more to life than perfection,” he tells me.

I guess I did ask him that question without realizing it. Whoops. Good thing he wasn’t offended or didn’t show it, at least. Unlike him, I’m looking for perfection in an imperfect world. Sometimes, I feel I’ve walked past the grand opening and walking toward the mediocre finale.

It can’t be the end. Can it?

I have half my body left. The lesser part but still half.

He has left me. I can’t say anymore: no questions or wisdom. I watch him make his way to the man with the guitar strapped on his back. The Brit bumps into him on the crosswalk. The man turns around, but the Brit is too far away to hear him. I feel let down. He should’ve been more convincing, put the guitar man in his place.

This never was my city. I can’t wait to leave. Yet, I will stay a little longer.

I can’t let it eat another person alive.

Not this week.