Girl, Freckles

Stephen Brook. Food to Go. 2017. Acrylic on canvas. 39 x 39 inches. Courtesy of ARTicles Art Gallery.

Girl, freckles, bruises, presses her knees together and tries not to let her jeans touch the gummy stain on the lip of the plastic seat as she traces the cool metal logo on the zipper pull of her suitcase and perches her forehead against the bus window, a heart-shaped patch of fog extending and receding under her nose, the glossy lenses of her sunglasses failing to cover the bruises blooming across her cheeks that an older woman tries not to stare at as she drops her quarters through the stainless steel maw of the farebox and shuffles down the aisle, her heartbeat accelerating like a bouncing ping pong ball, her thoughts piling up on one another like overeager baby animals—This is new, this is different, I knew today felt special, maybe could—until the girl shifts her suitcase from her lap onto the aisle seat and coughs and looks at her hands.

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Girl, freckles, messes with the radio in her car and the airbag explodes in her face and all in all she's fine but not so much the man lying in the street leaking blood from his ears. Girl, freckles, goes out to buy Hawaiian rolls and boxed ham the way her boyfriend likes it (thickly sliced, flavored with smoke) and drives into a man at a speed that separates his left femur from his tibia and cracks five of his ribs and his cellphone and his skull, though all she sees is a substance that resembles in color and viscosity but couldn't possibly be blood, she wasn't capable of that, he must have been carrying some sort of juice or syrup, so many fruits are red these days, she tells herself as she accelerates away, back over the bridge and onto and off of the turnpike and down narrower and greener roads until she's standing on the banks of the old abandoned pond, license plates in one hand, wad of bloody napkins still in the other, watching the water settle and wondering what else made the car hers, wondering if the pond is still abandoned or if it ever had been at all. Girl, freckles, bruises, deploys her suitcase and pretends to cough to keep an old woman with an old friendly face from sitting down next to her and asking questions like she knows she will, that face of hers all old and friendly and witnessing and alive.

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What a unique crime, staring, the woman thinks, her face warming, sweat beginning to tickle down her sides—you exist in one of two discrete states, caught or not caught, living free or dead, no moment where it could go either way, no chance of escape, certainly no trial of one's peers, so who's the real victim here, she tells herself, tells herself the girl is no better than the rest of them, rude and self-centered and commandeering a seat certain people might consider a treasure after a day slash week slash lifetime of, say, standing in the crosshairs of tenth-graders and squeaking out unit circles and trig identities on a whiteboard, and has just rolled onto the balls of her feet to relieve the pain in her heels in a way she hopes doesn't look fake but also isn't too subtle to notice when the bus succeeds in punching its way back into traffic and she goes flying forward, just catches a handrail in time to avoid the lap of the man in gray sweatpants tweezing dried plant matter out of an Altoids tin onto translucent paper and grinning and saying things like, "I had a misplaced youth," to the lady across the aisle and shouting things like, "Fuck you!" at the bus driver, to which the woman says nothing because she doesn't hear, is too busy clutching the handrail and trying to blank her senses, La la la la la la la, la la la la la, how...