Knees

My knees come out from under my dress like orphans. Cold, a little purple, surprisingly bald and round. They take what could have been elegance and make it a ham sandwich – mediocre, everyday, ordinary. Yelling out there from the middle of my legs, tweedle dee and tweedle dumber – a bump on their foreheads and a bruise on their chins. They laugh at my high heels and my calves strain to overcome it. My waist cinches in, my shoulders are unaware of their misbehavior. My right foot turns to the side in shame and my hip winces- the knees stays straight ahead, glaring and victorious in thier bulbous defiance.

Give-A-Way

My hands give me away like an adam’s apple. Always surprising in photos – fingers, too long, wrapped around a big mouth wine glass – Held against my face, palm to chin and middle finger touching hairline. Blue raised veins. Seventy percent of a frozen full-body gesture overwhelmed by knuckles and long spindly finger bones. They look like they could carry wooden buckets of water for miles or send signals to small men in big airplanes. I’m dwarfed by them. Pixied. They’re snapping – not wanting me to fall behind. They’re bored with me sometimes, gripping the back of a chair like they could keep me up, my arms freckled, trying to understand the expectations. I can read them much better when they are flat in a photograph – like they’ve sent me a letter to make it all very clear: hey. Look. Catch up.

Special Delivery

Today the blonde delivery man, the one who zooms more than the rest (the one who is neither Louis nor the one who always asks me to sign and says, always, “Two for you today…”) delivered three big rectangular boxes.
He ran out saying, “They must be plants!” I could hear him chuckling down the stairs.
The box looked upset with me. Torn at the edges, rounded at the seams. The mailing label said it was for Ryan down in costumes but the print said something about a nursery. Strange.
It also said, “Perishable.”
Something about the shape of it: alarming.
Perishable costumes. For refrigeration? Fruit costumes? An apple dress? A kiwi bathing suit? 
Ed came out of the elevator while I stood over them. He was pushing a row of costumes on a dolly.
I told him the boxes were for Ryan and he frowned. I read the label, the first row of print, the perishable bit – and he started to laugh.
“Oh god. Those must be the buffaloes. I’ll get them in a minute.”
Queezy. Come get them now please.
They’re doing a production called “Indians” in the fall. I asked if they were making costumes out of buffalo and he said, “No, they’re just going to drape themselves in them.”
Oh.
They didn’t want to pay for the tanned buffalo skins because they cost about eight hundred bucks a piece. So they bought these…untanned? buffalo skins. They didn’t have any odor at all from outside of the box- packed up in plastic and cardboard, but for some reason I could just smell them.
“Think they used the rest of the buffalo like the Indians would have?” I asked.
“Think they could’ve used fake fur?” I asked.
“They sent BUFFALO SKINS IN A BOX?!” I asked.
Ed rolled his eyes, “Oh. They wanted to use the real thing. They insisted.”
Are they going to do the production in a field? Are they going to hire Native Americans? What else will be the really real real thing?
When I asked him what particular organization sold buffalo hide before the buffalo had officially been separated from its hide he said, “Some guy on ebay.”
Ed said that when they opened the boxes and the plastic, flies flew out.
OF COURSE FLIES FLEW OUT. It’s the skin and fur of a goddamn BUFFALO.
You wouldn’t believe the smell, Ed told me. He gripped the front of his shirt. He said they opened the second box out on the dock. There were still pieces of fat there on the hide. And more flies. He shook his head. “Last time when we got a bear we didn’t have it tanned either. But it wasn’t like this. I can’t IMAGINE asking actors to touch this thing.”
Last time when we got a bear?
I don’t know.
Lil came up then, chewing on a Starburst from the vending machine, “Oh yeah! Those things. Could smell em all the way through the shop and into the hallway. Terrible. All that hide and all the things they had with them in their fur. Phew.”
Ed says they’re hoping they can return them.
Put them back on? What? I don’t know.

I Just Think I Should.

I have decided that it is time to keep track of my coworker’s expressions. There is no reason they should go unpublished. I take no responsibility for their genius. I am only a witness.

“Kids and kids, as we say.”

When someone makes an unreasonable request and then leaves the room: “Well! TS Mrs. Elliot.”

“Oh. They think their asses are ice cream.”

“Ok there Mister Fister.”

Her sometimes nickname for me: “Lady Elaine Fairchild”

And when I tell her I’m off to lunch: “Go in pieces.”

Curious

If your friend sorta tries to set you up with someone. And that someone is clearly gay and sorta cross-eyed, does that say something about you or your friend?
If you’re not attracted to someone whose eyes are so close together, their eyeballs could share a teacup across the bridge of their nose, does that make you shallow?

Lila

It was such with Lila that she would sometimes come out with a word or phrase as if a thing possessed – and it was in the air before her like a bubble she had hiccupped. Today, sitting at a table with new acquaintances, she had said something simple when asked an unanticipated question. She had said only, “Because when I laugh I don’t think of anything at all.” There wasn’t much poetry to it but there must have been a some-thing in the truthful accident of her delivery. She felt the familiar silence that always stopped her. Pleased and embarrassed, she was aware of her charm and completely disgusted by herself: trite, calculating. But this afternoon her outburst had caused one of  the new acquaintances to look at her long and hard in that way that made her want to look back and be all that he saw in that instant- stare back and take all of her power in her hands and eat it like steaming homemade blueberry pie. Devour, capture- let it shine our of her fingertips and the ends of her hair – standing up like static….The rest of the group looked away or flipped a french fry with a fork. Someone who had known Lila longer laughed. She tried to laugh too. Among friends she may have elaborated and wouldn’t necessarily want to touch a hand in apology. She looked up and around and laughed a little before saving herself, as though doubling as her own husband coming in to freshen drinks in the nick of time, she looked around the table and said, “Isn’t this food great!” Everyone indulged in a communal fidget and quiet shudder before the spell began to break- like pins being pushed into a water balloon, everyone leaking back out of themselves and into the world.