Each life is of a single thread that connects each experience; one single thread that holds our lives together, and weaves through our lives. Sometimes that thread begins to fray, as it did with Ash, whose name though incidental came to represent her life.
Whose name incidental came to represent remains. She held within her many remains. She held within her veins hot liquid that burned her inside and turned her skin ash-white, to match her name; to match her remains.
Hey eyes were olive and her hair like smoke. And one day she erupted and there remained a powdery residue of images.
***
Today she slaps barefoot across a Saltillo-tiled apartment floor, canyon-red and desert-sand beige. Outside a moving van downshifts for a curve and rumbles with the low reverberation of a deep-throated whale deep-feet under sea.
Usually, she passes her days with idle tasks and always waits for evening; always waits for the sky to turn rose while the day plucks the chimes that hang from the fire escape.
Presently the sky is clear blue and the air fine, so that the slam of a car door echoes like a hollow tin cup. Cars circle in front of her building, and speed away at night; often very loud, and very drunk.
She hears the gritty gravel under hot tires, and the chaulky scrape of tennis shoes on the sidewalk below the window; and the birds, as they squirt sounds at one another.
She can hear when her neighbors shower. The water flows loudly behind the walls like rust being sanded. Many times, she hears them fight and hate and slam things. And sometimes, she hears them make love. And once, she heard the sound of one girl coming to orgasm with another, and she brought herself to orgasm, too.
She hears many things; especially at night.
She often hears a train horn; and she travels with the train and the note inside her body. The sound picks her up and carries her with it until she can hear it no longer. And the horn, distant and constant, makes her think of London and fog; though she has never been.
And she carries a boy in her thoughts.
She has carried him down long stretches of highway with the noon sun hitting the windshield sharp, with the windows down and the breeze warm. She has carried him through salty air under a double-ringed rainbow stretched across a cement plant.
She has carried him through expensive neighborhoods with tile facades and huge oak trees lining the streets. And she has carried him in rash summer jumps into freezing water of Spring; through streets of abandoned warehouses, by shoddy brick buildings, under nights humid with fireflies; through a white sun on a Fall day, and through a leaf translucent in the golden setting of a summer sun.
She has carried him many places. She has carried him places she has never been.
And all these things are real.
And when the day is grey and the air heavy but cool, she hears the sound of cars on the highway, distant like the sound of a large ocean wave coming, always coming. And the draft through her kitchen window carries a violin, a guitar, and a voice singing sadly in Portuguese.
At night she carries with her music. When she leaves her flat, she carries the flutter of a clarinet beating low like the wings of a hummingbird.
But when she leaves her flat, she meets a girl with a bloody wrist and a sharp-coked tongue. When she leaves her flat, she meets a man named Emilio who eats dirt and who has, on his back, a large tumorous knot.
When she pumps gas, she meets a man named Daniel who pats her ass to send her on her way. And when she leaves she meets all the life that wants to touch and twist and tamper.
She meets all the life that is no life.
When she leaves, in the residue of night, she drives to calm her nerves.
But when she leaves, she then sees another far worse: a woman, alone, staggering by the neon lights of a plastics supply store. And the woman’s purse hits her hip, hits her hip, hits her hip with each step. And then she wants to cry, for this woman is what this woman may want to be: easy prey.
And all these things are real.
And all these things are real…