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Her hair was bright fake red, a wedge in front of her right eye. She dressed like a thief, all black t-shirts and pants with a hundred pockets. Camouflage; love and rockets. When she was little, she napped beneath the microwave. Every day. The sun shone a spot on the couch, and her mother slept in it: the sunlight shape of the window moved from her feet up her legs to her chest and then, when it slipped up to her eyes, roused her. Sylvia spent this time sleeping too, but on top of the stove, under the humming microwave. She set it so it would beep her awake before her mother woke. Her mother did not like for her to sleep under the microwave. "Sylvia," she said, "there are cancer beams and heart disrupticators and medical anomifiiers that emit from that thing. Do you want to die?" Sylvia didn't want to die, but she did want to sleep. Some people listen to tapes of the ocean to relax: she had the whir of the fan and the wiggle of the water molecules above her. He had hair like moss. He dyed it every week, so black that it looked blue. She'd grown up in the sort of house where you hang the towels on the rack symmetrically, after you use them. Where it was more important for the lines the vacuum left on the rug to be regular than it was for the floor to be clean. Her house had been that way because of her: her parents were old hippies who cared less about housekeeping than they did about bitching. Bitching about public schools, bitching about how they'd home-school little Sylvia if it weren't so much effort. Bitching about the government, bitching about friends who were going up the river on weed charges. Her parents would have liked him if they'd met him. He'd been raised by his father (and therefore the television) without much friction at all. They'd lived in four rooms and a hallway upstairs from a woman from Mexico who cooked every night. In the fall when it was dark early, her kitchen glowed through Venetian blinds while she cooked. He'd always assumed she was using a big black cauldron, eyes of newt and babies' tongues. He never spoke to her and then she died when he was fifteen. He sat in a thicket across the way smoking cigarettes, while they moved her things out. There was no cauldron. Still, he'd remember the smell of cilantro in this context for the rest of his life, and associate it with fall, cauldrons, childhood and home. Acne followed him into adulthood. It never really cleared up, but it wasn't the sort of acne that kids dread or that makes mates cringe. He learned early on that picking at it, popping at it and messing with it only made things worse. He was diligent in cleaning his face twice a day and that was it. He kept away from mirrors. She could look at herself all night. After his father killed hers and they became lovers, he spent a half-hour in bed watching her watch herself modeling his shirt in the eight-foot wide mirror across from her bed. He was enchanted but weirdly disgusted. "I always think that men's shirts- and nothing else- are one of the most flattering things a woman can wear," she told him, dropping a shoulder to see her own thin collarbone through the open shirtneck. "You do look a lot better than I do in it," he said, leaning forward. Her cotton bedsheet dropped to his waist. He wrapped his arms around her chest, just above the breasts, and pulled her back onto the bed. She laughed. "How did I wind up with you," she asked. She'd gone to a private high school. There was no uniform and there were no boys so she lived a lot of her adolescence in sweatpants. She hadn't been popular in school and had spent most of the time drunk. (No one knew.) She didn't sleep well. The only other girl she knew in high school was from Argentina and didn't speak English as well as maybe she should have, but she couldn't be bothered to get any better. She could scowl, though. And smoke. Sylvia scowled a lot, too, and so they became friends. Their friendship wasn't based on anything that they had in common except for a shared hatred toward everything.
Approximate Word count = 2916
Approximate Pages = 11.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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