The Air Between Us

Dear Charlie,

Read this letter by the shore.

Stand and feel. Feel the continent of nothing that separates us. See me from across the world gazing to you. Your eyes are green swirls in tidal pools. Waves wreathe sea foam along damp tracts of sand. My toes curled in the silken loam; up to my knees, breakers beckoning, undulating, “come deeper” the creamy tops swallowing my legs, hips.

Charlie feel the air between us.  Let it caress, let it hold you, let it grip you. Lick blowy against you, through you.  The sky is warm, pliable, let it enfold you. Taste the salt-spray  bite of the breeze.

 I kiss the air between us.

Feel my kiss on the air between us.

Love,
L.A.F

Signs

     Charlie in blue suit and striped tie swinging his briefcase slightly,walked through the fog on an unusually warm December to a five story apartment building of light brown brick and bay windows on W. 96th Street and pressed the intercom button marked D. Sign.
     Derrick rolled over searching for her warm soft skin, but woke to the faded smell of suntan lotion on the pillow next to him.  "Aw, Shit." he groaned. "She's gone." Has been gone for two months now.
     The bell rang an angry shriek again. Trembling and head circling, he heading the thirteen steps to the door, and pressed the intercom button.
    "Come up." he growled and flipped the lock open.
    The elevator being out of service Charlie headed up the stairs sweating from the climb and the strange December humidity.  Charlie knocked and the door floated open; inside was a moderately sized apartment with an open floor plan living area with a small kitchen and a hallway leading to other rooms. Shelves of books, leather bound volumes, ancient looking tombs and large art and photography books covered one entire wall.  The furniture was spare; a black leather sofa, a dinette set in the kitchen, and a aspidistra plant in the corner.
     Charlie, busy taking in the apartment didn't notice Derrick come out of the bathroom down the hall vigorously drying his face on a towel.
     "What? Are you with the IRS?"
     "Professor Sign, we talked on the phone, we had an appointment? Charlie Farmer with Forrest Insurance."
     "Right". Derrick moved to the sofa and sat hand holding his temples, moving head his head side to side cracking the bones in his neck and jaw. Running his hand over two days stubble and his shaved crew-cut.
     Charlie wondered why he got stuck with these assignments. Difficult clients who had to be visited at home. Charlie sat at the other end of the sofa and put his briefcase next to him; there was no coffee table.
     "OK Professor Sign, ah do you prefer Professor, Dr. or Detective?"
     "Whatever Chuck lets just get this thing over with." Derrick grumbled feeling his stomach churn with last nights gin and tonics.
      "Because we dealt with all the preliminary questions over the phone Prof. Sign I just have a few more things to clear up. We will be done quickly; I will get your signature and be on my way before you know it."
      "Right, shoot."
      "Do you use alcohol or tobacco?"
      "I have the occasional drink, and once in a while I will have a cigar."
      "OK, any family history of disease."
      "My mother was a terrible driver."
      "Excuse me?"
      "No none, are we done?"
      "How long have you've been blind?"
      "Twenty years but who's counting. Its only partial, I get around just fine."
      "Really, then what kind of hat am I wearing?"
      "Your not wearing a hat."
      "Good guess. But it says in your file that you lost your vision while still an officer for the NYPD. Correct?"
      "Your wearing a sensible blue suit and I think your girlfriend who wears a clean, flora perfume picks out your tie, so that is most likely striped and red for the holiday season. Your a insurance salesman so your clean cut but today you didn't shave because you were meeting a blind man. Your shoes are scuffed because you walk a lot to meet clients and you stepped in something on the way here. Your wearing a watch but its not working. And your sweating like a pig."
      "Wow, how the fuck did you do that."
      "Listen, I can tell you more. But right now I want to ask you a question."
      "OK Professor Sign."
      "What did you do with that green hat you stole- Mr. Farmer?"

The Grey-Eyed Girl 3

     The alley way was dark but for ambient light of the city and a naked bulb that flickered over the door she just pushed out of- he following.  A lone cat scampered over some crates and streaked down the alley; the air was permeated with the order of stale beer, urine and garbage.  Through the funnel of buildings, traffic, trucks gasping and sighing could be heard; the incessant honking, blaring of taxis, the squeal of brakes.
     She faced him and pushed him up against the building, made to kiss him but passed her face next to his feeling his stubbled plump face. He turned to kiss her; she felt his mouth and teeth slobbering on her neck his excitement palpable and groping.  
     "Oh, your some kinda freak huh? Good. What do I call you? I mean what's your name anyway?"
     "You can call me Delilah."
    His paw like hands moving over her back and ass, she leaned back and looked him in the eye, ran a hand over the back of his bald head pushing his head down to her crotch. The grey-eyed girl stepped back a little from him and her eyes matched the grey snub nosed Beretta she pulled from her handbag. 
      "Wha...what the fuck? Wha..what d-do...do you want?" staring down the bore hole; black, flat and empty of any solace.
       The girl with the gun-metal grey eyes shoved the short barreled Beretta into his mouth grinding and chipping teeth. 
       "Do you want to live?" the girl with the gun-metal grey eyes said. "Voir ma misère, hélas! Voir ma détresse." she quoted; a tear cold and slow rolling down her check. Her black fingernails tight on grip, but easily and light on the trigger.
    Gun in mouth; Samson jerked his head in shaky yeses.
    "Good....THEN STOP WRITING BAD POETRY!!!"
  There was motion from a fire-escape overhead a figure leaned back into an apartment.
She left Samson weeping and trembling in a heap and out of the alley and into the New York night.

The Dream of the Grey-Eyed Girl

    Sitting, reading a cloth bound book under a ginkgo tree a grey-eyed girl is falling asleep. A burgundy silk book mark ripples obedient and languorous in the breeze. Fan shaped leaves shake and fall a bright yellow cascade around her.  She wears a mans sweater; the top two buttons missing she holds it closed with robin eggshell blue painted fingernails, when the breeze turns into a gust sweeping up the hill making the blond heads of the dry, overgrown  grass wave and dance like ecstatic dervishes. Her grey eyes squint and watch a kestrel hovering over her tree and dart back out over the field and back again.
    Back firmly against her tree, her favorite tree atop the hill, she feels the comfort of soil, root, the entire earth. Experiencing the earth pulling her in and letting her go at once as she closes her eyes and nods off.  The grey-eyed girl dreams of her mother; still young, vibrant dark hair, glamorous and mysteriously inviting like an alleyway at night. A promise of something behind those star-like eyes. She senses all the protection and leonine power in the way she embraces her father. Her father handsome; when all the markings of his face were but an outline and map for the deeply entrenched emotions that she would know.  They hold each other tightly, and she hears the kestrel screaming.
    "Charlie, I dreamed about her again." Louise said sitting up in bed.
     "The grey-eyed girl?" Charlie said without turning over.

The Letter

Dear L.A.F.,

      It's getting near to Christmas time and the leaves are falling- they get pushed and scattered by the wind   swirling as I walk the city surrounding me. Everyone races around, the men have taken to wearing hats again and the women their long coats and stockings, I have to hurry from one avenue to the next or get swallowed up. I'm not quite used to it.  I can't help looking and investigating the vertical landscape.   It is in a quiet gaping awe that I gaze at the decorative windows, facades, and the wrought iron gates; here a walk-up apartment house, there a church and again another apartment, townhouses and Tudor revival buildings. Lobbies, all in marble, bigger than the house I grew up in. 

      The city is a Goliath of ponderous concrete, sublime artistic craftsmanship, and continuous motion. But what is this monolith of constant motion compared to you?   I know I promised to write you a poem.  Compared to your eyes on me what is the city, the city awes me but you with just a turn of  your head, a word, or reaching over in your sleep to clasp my hand and hold it close to your breast, there is utter fascination and wonderment. What is a city compared to your beguiling, I'm bewildered by you at times; the city in comparison is predictable and dull. I think of your hair like a dark waterfall flowing. Rushes over me and crushes me and I drown in perfumed delight in bountiful sensuousness. I am suffocated in locks like blackbirds wings fluttering and beating against my face but it feels incredible to be under and I take big gulps of you.  

     I read a scientific article that said some women can see an extra color on the visible color spectrum (that might explain some fashions we see today) they are called the tetrachromatic women. That's what happens when I look at you a whole different spectrum is revealed- things look brighter and better.  Maybe that is what love does; it brings the whole world to life in different colors.

    I am running short on time I hope everything is well with you my love.  I wrestle everyday about rejoining you. Not having you by my-side at times is too much.  I want to leave but I know what is best for us both. With that, here is to the hope we will be reunited soon, until then I will continue to see the world in this new light and know you are still in my heart.

With love always,

C. Farmer

 P.S. You have to see the wonderful parks, in the next letter I will tell you all about them. I even saw a kestrel eating a pigeon last week.

She Takes the Stage

     Amid scattered applause the singer took the stage. Her red lipstick shone in the pool of stage light set off against her clear ivory complexion and hair the color of October fallen leaves; somewhere between red and brown. A shimmering green sequined dress clung to her and held the collective gaze of the small subterranean nightclub's patrons. She clutched a Pomeranian under one arm, the microphone stand in the other. Her voice started out a husky whisper but grew resonate and had the depth of an underground river. She sang:

We met in the cool breeze of spring.
walked along the quay and the riverside
went to cafes and talked the day and evening away
we watched the stars all night.
in the morning
you said you could love me all year through.

In the summer we spent all day at the ocean-side
drank in saloons and danced and swayed
passing our way; we watched the stars shoot through the sky.
And you said
you would love me all the year through
 

In the autumn the wind chilled and blew
but we were warm together, I held tight to you.
and there were stars in our eyes.
and you were loving me all year through.
 

Then the days grew quick and the nights never-ending
because you had left me,
oh why, oh why?
You had said the stars had fallen from my eyes.
 

and you said you would love me all year through
and you said you would love me.....

      She finished, her last breath was like a sighing wind beneath a bridge. She let the microphone topple over, held her dog tightly and left the stage. Before she left through the service exit behind the stage she donned her chameleon skin green hat with the ostrich feather. Ava de'Fleur the famed French singer promised herself never to sing the song again as she walked off into the New York night.

The Green Hat

           The hat was green and glowing like a dessert under glass in a roadside diner. The color of neon jell-o made of felt with an ostrich feather sticking out of the slightly darker band.  The brim was wide and round and stiff; twice as large as a manhole cover.  “I have to have that hat". Louise laughed as they walked by the brightly lit window.

       Taxis whooshed by on the damp street and the air was cooler now.  Louise had Charlie's arm and was hugged up against his shoulder.  "That's just your style Lou, Come on lets see how much it is."

  "You know I was kidding right?" Giving Charlie a wry smile.
  "I know I just want to see you in it. It will be funny". 
    A little bell rang as the entered the small shop. They specialized in designer hats that all looked to be too asymmetrical to wear or too heavy or just too plain ugly.  Charlie approached a tall thin woman with a bright orange bob haircut behind the counter.  The lady looked up from her accounting pushing her bifocals back up her beak like nose.  "Yes, can we help you?" The lady drawled in a think French accent.

     Charlie trying not to crack up said “Why yes Madame, can we perhaps see that beautiful green hat on display there."
     The sales lady slinked her sinewy body  from the behind the counter bringing a key on a long sparkling chain with her.  Her long red dress clashed violently with the green of the hat as she removed it from the case, she looked like a Christmas decoration gone horribly wrong.  She held it out in her thin long arms at full length to read the price tag. Clutching the tag with one talon like hand she read. "Oui, this one is a Calvaconte, from Italy very nice" Charlie couldn't help to peek at the price tag.

     The green saucer of the brim actually shimmered like chameleon skin; the color wasn't as bad removed from the glare of the display case neon light.   The clerk placed the hat on Louise's head at an rakish angle that divided her face diagonally. "Oo-lala, tre bein, this hat it suits you very well." the clerk squawked.

       Louise turned and looked into the gold framed mirror and thought right away how wrong she was about the hat. It made her look sophisticated and as she modeled the hat for herself and Charlie she thought, I look almost mysterious as she pulled a dark lock of hair from behind her ear. Like a movie starlet from the 30's or 40's. 

      Just as Louise was reluctantly taking the hat off.  A bell attached to the door rang and a man in a white dress shirt and dark suit pants pushed his way in.  His hair was wild and shirt stained and stretched over a large belly, his face was red and unshaven; his bulbous nose even redder. Running his hands over his wild grey, head the man shouted at the clerk "Mimi you bitch, you cheating bitch!" the man continued to yell like this but in an incomprehensible drunken french. Mimi the clerk wasn't backing down and didn't seem to mind that Charlie and Louise were there.

       "Who are you talking too? You louse! You drunk?" Mimi shrieked.

     Mimi went right up to him and jabbed her bony finger into his chest and backed him into a back room. Where there was a loud clatter like a table being overturned or a book case falling. Charlie and Louise looked at each other.

     "Should we do something?" Louise said

      "No, let’s just get out of here".

      Louise started to take off the hat but Charlie grabbed her arm hard and said "Come on lets go!  Take it." 

They hit the door with a bang and the little bell rang wildly as they were out of the shop and heading down 42nd street.