Fiction: Nine Minutes, part one

“Oh, I have a vibrator that color.”

I’m not even kidding; these are the things that she’d say. As if they weren’t supposed to drive me to distraction.

And we’d walk. For miles. For miles and miles we’d walk and walk and look at the buildings and the posters on the walls. There was nothing particularly romantic about the dirty brick. There was nothing very suggestive about the stained flyers. But I loved it. Every moment. I loved it and I loved the morning and the air and the moment. The air was alternately cool and clammy. The sounds were jarring and happy and busy. Car horns and outbursts of conversation and startled buses. People looked through us and walked around us, their minds on their destinations, their phones in their ears.

She was pointing at the obnoxiously pink block letters of a ratty poster glued to the side of a whitewashed warehouse.

LIVE!
THE SCENTED NIPPLE,
WITH BRITT’S CLITS
AND FURST BLUD
THURSDAY,
NOVEMBER 17,
9 O’CLOCK
AT BAD JAZZ,
9TH AND 9TH

She hugged my shoulder and pulled me along, through the crowd around the bus stop and past the newspaper stand, and then it was goodbye and see you tomorrow and take care and no kiss but a wink and I waved.

***

I should buy a car.

Every morning the thought crosses my mind. Every morning my phone buzzes and jumps and generally scares the shit out of me from underneath my pillow and I frantically push buttons until the awful get-the-fuck-out-of-bed song stops and I can go back to sleep for nine more minutes, thinking about getting a car as I slowly surrender my shocked and brittle conscious back to the soft, blurred edges and indistinct faces of people from school and work and home and school and I’m asleep.

Nine minutes later I’m all over it all over again and I should get a car and get out of bed but not yet and nine minutes after that I actually get up. And out. Of bed.

The tile is freezing on the floor in the bathroom.

I hate brushing my teeth. Maybe more than anything. Taking a shower is routine, but brushing my teeth never sinks into the framework of the morning.

“I love brushing my teeth. No flossing. But my toothbrush is my best friend. After you.” She’s such a liar.

Her hair is blowing into my face so I keep my mouth shut but it might be too late. I can feel it on my lips. We’re walking down the street in the shadow of brick buildings and the smell of exhaust everywhere, staining the morning, staining the flyers, staining our lungs. The wind is tugging at the flyers, tugging at my jacket, flattening my hood against the back of my head. But maybe it’s just the busses coming and going.

THURSDAY

She’s pointing at one of the posters, saying something that belongs in my ear alone right out loud, “…that color.” One sad corner of the poster pulls away, sticky, from the wall, covering part of the garish announcement.

We walk and walk and walk and say goodbye. Waving.