GINGER

    Ginger was happy. She had just eaten, and had eaten a lot, and was very happy about how much she ate. She sighed with happiness, letting it drip from her heaving tongue. The stuff hit the floor. The sound made her happy.
    She was waiting. She was waiting for a symptom, a noise, a burst of timing and light in that small, squalid space she explored every day, its corners matching its walls at the skips and points of time. She heard the noise. She told the noise she heard it. The noise she heard back made her feel like she remembered she felt. The noise made her happy.
    She knew the man with the lonely voice was coming. He came every day with the knock of the door, his face hanging low like a tired, unlit candle. He was coming, because he came the time before today, and the time before that, and time and time until she couldn’t remember anymore. He talked like a wet cigar. She dug into the padding of the couch. She became remarkably happy.
    Her body quaked and quivered, catching the air around it. She shook and sighed like a music box, little parts bumping and clanging without notice or care. She knew it was coming; the little parts told her so. She slopped her way towards the square of blue time and let it run down her leg, all hot and gold. It felt good to have the little parts move inside her, climb their way up her skin and up and down her face and eyes. She liked it. It always ended too soon.
    They were talking again, outside the door. She knew they were talking because of the noise they made from themselves, the highs and the lows and the dignified sighs. She always heard them make the noise, those bodies outside the door, and sometimes she relayed her knowledge, let them know she knew, though she didn’t right now. No, she was waiting for the cigar man and his baritone tone. She had no time for their noise.

  She was up now. She had been in the place where she wasn’t awake. She didn’t like it, she knew she remembered she didn’t like it, its smells, its clouds. It was a lost place, a place where she couldn’t move or think in the ways she remembers, but moved and thought in a way that didn’t want her to remember, didn’t want her to know. She didn’t like it. She needed to remember. She always remembered. The sputum of sleep shot from her front.
    He was coming. He had to be coming, because he always came. The woman with the only smile wasn’t coming for a long time now, because she had been gone a long time since she had seen her. She was warm all over wanting him to come. She couldn’t stop thinking about his big knob hands, rubbing all over her body like violent little earthquakes. He liked to touch her. She knew he liked it. She liked it too.
    She’s in the place where she’s not awake now. She knows it, because she’s running, she’s able to run, and she’s away from all the things she knows, all these things she knew, the blue square and the lonely smile and the way his hands shot off her body and came down like happy drums. She knew there was something she remembered, something she couldn’t say. She didn’t know why she couldn’t say it, tell every noise she heard that she knew it. She just knew she couldn’t.
    She ran the way she remembered she would, the way that wouldn’t let her remember. It felt good to not wait for what she knew would happen. It made her happy to be gone from the waiting. She couldn’t remember when she felt so happy, just to run. The clouds seemed to part in her wake.