Toot-Toot

A Story by Hawksmoor

The woman sat down in the chair behind the man with his nose buried in a drab horror anthology. She sat in an unoccupied seat that had moments before been occupied by a boy in his mid-teens who could've been her younger brother.

"I was sitting there," said the boy from nowhere. There was a loose grin on his face. In his head, he had won a battle of some kind.

The woman rose from the squashy bookstore chair and groped her way to the seat to the immediate right of the man with the horror-buried nose. She didn't take her eyes from the pages of the book she held as she moved. The air displaced by her sudden movement caught in the hairs of the man's nose.

The man thought of wildflowers beneath a full moon at summer's end.

Quite suddenly, the man was unable to understand sentence composition. His eyes lost focus of the words on the twenty-ninth page of the horror anthology. He found himself reading the same line over and over again. He had lost the ability to retain knowledge from moment to moment.

Of their own accord, his eyes drifted to the right. Thin hands slid absently through hair with the consistency of spun silk. Lips like rose-lined pincushions kissed the air. A waist with the easy curve of a coastline held the back of a very lucky chair.

The woman curled in her chair like a well-fed cat and allowed her flip-flops to slip from her feet and drop to the floor.

It was on.

And popping.