flashcard

Everything itches, everything.  A calamine lotion ocean, pink as a labial sunset, could not even dulcify this scaliness.  He is a small business owner (let's be honest: a partner), of course he is out cavorting in the linear modernity of an upscale establishment.  Mojito glasses clink and wink at each other.  They are in over their heads.  Mint leaves swirling and plastering to the interior of the sweaty cylinders and he thinks of the old avocado wallpaper in the house where he grew up.  Today, he wishes he could become even more obdurate to the advancement of everyone's zeal.  However, just because he has dry skin doesn't mean he is a snake.

"It's, like, the worst time right now to upgrade your units."

"Well, the weatherman said there was going to be a sixty percent chance of rain tonight."

A dissonance in the scratching of heads that engenders an even deeper cacophonous lacing of the metaphorically mental shoelaces.  Tomorrow morning he will hear his shower running while he still lays, sweaty and prickly, in his three-week unwashed sheets.  Christmas lights with small, but boldly colored, paper globes (like a dozen eyes) act as crown molding and doorjambs, ambient gateways to other worlds.

She produces a handful of matchbooks from her purse.  She narrows in on one of them in particular.  A conglomerate of numbers more than letters.  

"I have something I want you to look at," the look of remembrance still twirling in her eyes.    

She holds the matchbook a pinky-length (the average sized pinky) from his nosebridge.

"Can you read this phone number for me?" she eats her left lipcorner in a rapt fear.

He unlatches his hand from the tall drink and aims his fingers for the rectangular shape.  Water-beads recede southward down the glass.

"No, no," she is defiant but amply playful, "look at it from where it is."

He squints his eyes and plucks at his chin scruff like he is picking up dry elbow macaroni noodles that spilled from a kitchen counter, one by one.  He smiles that smile that most would call a smirk, the smile's rough-edged, Old Crow-swilling uncle.

"I am very happy with this," he responds, deepening the irony, "Okay.  1-2-3...4-5-6-7.  Is this some kind of joke?  That's not a real phone number."

"So, that's what you see, too, eh?" she quickly buries the matchbook into the cavernous folds of her purse once more.

"Where did you get that?"

"I found it."

The Puerto Rican rum has fully embraced the raw sugar coating the back of his throat and has sent him somersaulting into a visible torpor.

"Where?"

"On the train last night.  The Q line"

It all seems so heavy.  And he realizes he hasn't raked at his dessicated arms, his parched neck, or his arid soul with those clawed, oily hands of his since the tiny enigma arose like a patch of rosemary in a crack on a twelfth-story fire escape.