Dancing Scarf

A young man traveling across the country, haunted by the departure of his Bhuddist wife thinks he's finally found her when he sees her scarf.

Michael pushed his eyebrows down so they sagged like clay over his eyes. He busily contorted his cheeks with the stubs of his thumbs. He opened up his eyes, yellow, glazed and feverish from lack of sleep. There was a tiny jumping bug on his left eyelash. He felt the chiseled bulge of the .45 under his black denim jacket.

It had been six weeks since his wife left him. His beautiful wife with her red-orange hair and the face showered over with sunshine freckles. Big, blue eyes like Dasani bottles that reflected more than they sucked. It was a money thing. It was common.

He took a job just after they married in Baltimore at a paper-milling factory, as a line-worker for his Uncle-in-law, with the promise of a promotion. A year had passed. No promotion had come. The bills didn’t stack up. They covered every surface they could find. Anything clean. The small bright efficiency became dingy. The glass lamps wore human skin a millimeter thick. Cigarettes filled ashtray whirlpools. She started taking long nights out after her shift. She said she walked alone to look at the moon. Even on cloudy nights �" especially on cloudy nights because you had to trust that it was there.

There were no children. Both he and Michelle had decided that they would be a nuisance until there was easy living. Being thrifty wasn’t hard for her. She had found Buddhism in college. She didn’t want extra anything. No extra laundry; no extra food; no extra pleasure; no extra people �" just her and emptiness.  She wanted Nothing. She wanted so badly to be with Nothing. She devoted her life to it, had sex with it, ate with it, breathed it. And she could sleep with Nothing. But he couldn’t.

There was her shape and the falling of her hair, billowed curl over curl. The crinkling of the corners of her eyes when she talked about something intriguing. Her breath. The smell of scalp-skin on the back of her head. Her softness. Her voice. Her freedom. He loved everything she didn’t know she had.

That’s what had put him on the road to begin with: Nothing. She was a vacuum, pulling him in from across the country. He had saved for five weeks �" five agonizing weeks that blended together into one long day of mindless repetition. Then he sold everything he had �" everything besides the bills. He recycled the paper. He went from town to town, sleeping in his car most of the time. He stopped at strip clubs and McDonalds. He called and found a friend of hers who she’d stayed with, a flower girl who wore a fishbone on a hemp string around her neck and smiled through white horse-teeth. College friend. She let him stay with her. He slept with her. He left before she woke up, the scent of a memory battling with the present. Chicago.

Michelle had once seen Michael as part of Nothing. And then he faded into grey dusty reality; clouds, cracks and refractions, rainbows and storms whose winds blew his cover naked and visible.

He rubbed his eyes again and peered out of the windshield of his gray ’94 Honda hatchback, towards the apartment building marked with large gold letters above the green and glass door �" 44. He scanned the window and wondered which apartment she might be in.

He knew she had changed ever since he saw the scarf with the embroidered with the initials. M.L.G. drawn in moon-sliver silver, whirring against the tumbles of soft wool - green and brown, purple, grey and dark, dark yellow like the last fading light on the underbelly of a cloud before twilight.

He knew she had changed ever since the night he was walking out of another Chicago street-corner tavern, sterile alcohol on his breath. There was a short, round man in a black coat, and a hat like the ones ice fishermen wear, with the rabbit fur inside and the earflaps. The man was bundled up fiercely for such a mild, cold night, and that’s why Michael looked at him more carefully. The man had dropped his cigarette on the ground, and bent over in front of the tavern door. Michael was forced to wait. As the man stood up to walk away, Michael saw M.L.G. halfway under a fold of an old wool scarf. That’s when he finally found M.L.G. He didn’t bolt after him, but stood, stupefied in amazement. He wasn’t prepared for another man.

Before he left, M.L.G. followed him into the bathroom. It found its way into his food. He saw it in the folds of his pillow. M.L.G was between him, Michelle, and Nothing. M.L.G were the hookers. M.L.G was the horse-tooth girl.

The door flashed like a lighthouse. A blonde woman walking her dog. Thick thighs, blue on bottom and light blue on top, with large, white 90’s-style headphones. A face which belonged on a tennis team �" bright, wide, and earnest. The dog, small and white, ran out to the end of the leash and puffed vapor happily. She bent down on one knee and fastened her shoelace. The door flashed again. A man, slightly overweight, in a dark black pea-coat and a ice-fisherman cap, his neck bound up with a scarf.

Michael was struck by a sudden current. He watched as the man turned his right shoulder towards him. He had a pack of Marlboro cigarettes in his hand. He said something to the woman, who looked back and laughed. He spanked the pack with his palm. She called to her dog and was gone. The man had a cigarette in his teeth and thumbed a lighter wheel, cupping it preciously. It lit, and he turned to face the street, puffing it like a trumpet. Michael saw it embroidered on the worn edge of the scarf �" M.L.G.

His heart is a drop of water dancing on hot oil.

He lets himself get out of the car. He lets his legs carry the momentum faster and faster, from a walk, to a jog, to a run. He grips the gun and pulls it out under the sun.

The man in the black coat with his cigarette shivers in the wind. The scarf comes undone a little and flaps. The letters flicker in and out.

“Where is she?” Michael yells through whipping wind that threatens to steal his words.

“What?”

“You tell me where Michelle is or I’ll blow your head off!”

The short, fat man shows no sign of dawning comprehension. He puts up a gloved hand, extending his humanity.

“Easy buddy. I don’t want any trouble. I don’t know who Michelle is. I work at Time Warner. I’m the cable guy, eh?” The cigarette falls and shatters on the snow into a thousand angry fireflies, instantly muffled to death by the cold.

“You know where she is.”

The man in the black coat reaches with his left hand behind him. He starts backing up towards the door, slowly.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about, man! What do you want from me?”

“The scarf! That’s Michelle’s scarf! I made that scarf!”

“Oh this? Okay! Okay, you can have it.” He takes it off and drops it on the ground in front of him. He continues to back up.

“You knew her!”

“Look pal, I found it. It was, uh, tied around a treebranch in a park uh… Grant Park. Take it. I found it on New Years. Take whatever you want.”

He starts to fumble with his door-hand in his back pocket. His wallet is hard to pick out and keeps slipping back into his pocket from between his shaking fingers.

A loud crack resounds off the building’s face. The man in the black coat looks down at his body in horror, expecting to feel red life spill out of him. Instead, the scarf dances. Crack! It hops again. Crack!

Author's Note

Please be open and brutal! I want to be a better writer so please tell me any little way I could improve and what parts you didn't like! Thank you!

Reviews

[Faolan]

Really good paragraph form and indenting. Sometimes it's hard to do that with some computers and things like that. I love your story, too! There are no complaints. It's like you have been a writer your whole life.

[KeelyJane]

No complaints. I like your style.