Charlie rested her hand along the top of the bar - her fingers momentarily tracing the well-past worn grooves and scars, as intimate and familiar as her own fingerprint swirl - then with a practised grace and a sense of muscle memory she thought she'd long forgotten and left behind she arced her body up and over the top, her hand as pivot, her motion smooth and quiet, her legs slicing through the smoke-heavy air like a blade through water. Her feet came to rest on the thin rubber mat behind the bar as they always had and always would: toes pointed, feet perfectly aligned, muscles coiled and elegant and perfect.

"You nailed the landing, baby girl" said Claudette, her tone lost somewhere in the limbo between admiration and weary derision. Her eyes drifted over to the man in glasses, slowly, taking her time as she shifted focus. Charlie watched the long ash tracking like a gun sight, the reflection growing long and surreal in the convex reflection of his eyewear. "She was always good with landings."

Without looking, Charlie reached into the shelving beneath the bar. Muscle memory gave way to sense memory, as her fingers danced across forgotten keys and loose change, wrenches and screwdrivers, a box of condoms "ribbed, for my pleasure," as her mother liked to say, and then - in the back corner to which it always retreated - a thick roll of duct tape. She knew without looking it would be a flat, industrial gray. As her long fingers wrapped around the roll and pulled it toward what passed for daylight in this stagnant, half-lit corner of the world, she felt something brush against her wrist and fall onto the floor, pressed out and down into the welcoming grasp of gravity by the onrushing wall of tape. Without thinking, she looked away from her mother and the man with glasses and reached down.

It was folded in half. A piece of paper, she thought at first, and then she felt the smooth, glossy stock of the paper against her skin and she knew: a photo. She lifted it to chest level and pulled it open with her thumb and ring finger. Two people. Standing in front of what looked like a fenced park, or baseball diamond. A man, wearing an untucked white shirt and... Vans? She hadn't thought of Vans since Spicoli days. And a woman, full-bodied, with glasses or sunglasses and something like a bridesmaid's dress hugging her frame tight, taut, tender.

She shift the photo around in her fingers, facing it outwards. "What's this?" she asked her mother.

"Never you mind," her mother responded, her tone growing harder. "You just wrap up Mr. Man here for me, nice and clean, onto that chair. Just like I taught you."

This time, Charlie walked around the end of the bar. She tucked the photo into the back pocket of her pants, and then pulled free a great ribbon of tape from the roll. It came loose with a tearing and a high-pitched scream and an eagerness to find purchase and purpose around the wrists and ankles of the man with the glasses. To fulfill a long-awaited destiny. Charlie leaned forward and grabbed the tape between her teeth, and tore a first section off. "Sit," she commanded her erstwhile predator.

"Do indeed," echoed Claudette. A miasma of tar and burnt nicotine drifted over her yellowed teeth like some rotten fog fleeing the mouth of a bay. "You're not so bad-lookin', f'r a limp-dick cocksucker want to hurt my baby girl."

Charlie tracked a lone bead of sweat as it swam up from the man's thick and curly hairline, then cut a ragged path across and down the ridges of his forehead. Something awful inside of her wanted to smile.  "Maybe we can even have us some fun, 'fore we get through," her mother said, and as she smiled the ash quivered, and Charlie cast down her eyes and tore free another piece of tape.

Comments

[cIII]

"You just wrap up Mr. Man here for me, nice and clean, onto that chair. Just like I taught you."

Because it's the little things....

The mother/daughter relationship is going very Rob Zombie now. I dig it.

[ms picket to you]

to quote Loudon Wainwright:

"sometimes it bombs between daughters and moms"

and sometimes it's completely nuclear.