The Doorway

The door banged open dustily halting the men’s filthy conversation. She paused there in the opening, a sudden wind taking its cue to wrap around her silken form. Red swollen lips threw daggers at the men. Her word leveled with the finality of a commandment, a gale force whisper, the men quickly dispersed, their eyes following their expressions down to the wet puddles at their scratched leather shoes. Slithering down the steps, dark tendril hair reaching out against the street lamps, her form rocked from side to side punctuating the machinations of her walk hinted at behind taut clothing undecorated by intimacy. From my vantage point, I wondered what words she spoke to fill the men with such fear. But then, without realizing my blundering, I found myself staring at her. Her twin souls locked with mine reaching toward me with a purpose as I backed away. I tried to ignore her as she strode directly toward me like a predator, her heels announcing their owner’s devious intention like the impolite hammering of secret police at the door. I klutzed myself back into a park bench in time for her sharpened index finger to pierce my chest. She spread her lips past glistening teeth and inhaled, head cocked to one side, lips approaching the curve of my left ear, switchblade fingernails gleaming near my right.

Psychologists call it repression, my inability to remember the content of what she spoke of to me. It’s the brain’s way of handling a trauma. All I remember is the waterfall of love that fell from my heart the moment she spoke, the emotion, the liquid singularity. I am looking at my body playing in the sunbeams dividing the ocean in an endless dance.