suburbia

The dog which used to bark as I passed, scaring me every time, lies vacantly behind the mesh metal fence. Afternoon sun pounds heavy on the pavement and my worn black stilettos keep getting stuck in the cracks. Someone is playing piano at the dead boy’s house; though I know it is just a recording. I have heard the slightly off timing and one bad note a thousand times before. A little further down, pouches of flesh, soft and pillowy, hang down the back of an old lady sitting, topless in the shade of her front yard. As I walk past she does not flinch, but simply continues, big band music tinny and quiet from the small radio on the grass.
Last night this street was empty, shadows making holes in the asphalt, cracking open to show the roots of old trees and dust of moon-white bodies stepping, grasping, falling over. I traced with my fingers the quiet blue veins which twisted around the thin arms of a little boy. He didn’t pull away just held his arms heavy with the meaning we assign to trivial things, swinging slowly back and forth in the night. The street lights glared, whilst stillness and wind intertwined through the leaves and branches overlooking thirty-one old houses. Behind fences lay front yards and verandas, hallways and sitting rooms, kitchens and bathrooms with laminexed cabinets. My eyes closed and opened again, every action an eternity whilst the dark-grey ground, still warm from the day, got caught between my toes. A voice like a bird but sadder, very much sadder, was pulled out in the empty street, and it shocked me when I realized it was me who made it.
We pushed and pulled at each other’s bodies, staying awake and never eating, growing thin and dreamy and delirious, speaking and thinking of nothing at all. The emptiness of a clean slate, the beauty of a body reduced to its purest form, floated, and each shaking finger, half-closed eye spoke of something different to each of us.