"A small, simple and precise cut,"Bethany tells herself, awkwardly holding the cold metal scalpel gleaming in her delicate, trembling hand. An accomplished surgeon, she had done this a million times before. But this time the frail little girl, with the big bubbly eyes, now lying helpless on the operating table was her daughter.
Sweaty palms and heartbreak greet her as she approaches the door. Wiping her shoes on the mat, she nervously laughs at the irony of the word "welcome,"now smeared with mud from soles of her heels. A mistress at her lover's home, she had hopes of coming clean.
Her hardened eyes pierce into the mirror, as if her stare could warrant change in the reflection. She hated the grotesque bits of flab that spilled from the sides of her jeans, the monstrous thighs that shook the pavement as she walked, and the neck that painfully hid under crevices of chin. Poor deluded Rachel, overweight at size 2.
It was unusually cold that night in August, as the taxi cut its way through town, right beside the shore. I looked at him, shy but content when he reached for my hand. Soon he'd become just like the postcards--meaningful, but an ocean away.
Sheltered from the lashing of the rain that wrecked havoc on the roof above her, she opened the envelope rather cautiously. A month ago it would have been her deliverance; a testimony of love could keep her pretty head sane while she drowned lonely in her bed, inconsolable by the warmth of her sheets. But today, as she carefully opened the pages of his letter, she mouthed a silent prayer on her lips--that he would grow out of her, just as she had grown out of him.
Not a penny to his name, old Mister Peterson, dressed shabbily in his tattered Armani from '76, trudges miserably down the street. The soles of his shoes are worn right through the ground, making every pebble, crack and abnormality in the pavement known to his raw, aching feet. Miraculously, a crisp twenty dollar bill is lying helplessly between two newspaper boxes, and as old Mister Peterson rushes towards his newfound treasure that gleams in the October sun, he's as light as a feather.
As the bright lights shine fiercely from above, Johnny knows the entranced crowd is living off every string he meticulously plucks on his guitar. Bright blue eyes stare intensely into nothing, as notes from his lungs cut through the air like precise incisions in an operating room. Glancing shamefully at the lesions on his arms, black and blue from reckless inoculations, he continues to sing--music; the only savior to his vice.