THEGLASS GIRL

Appeared originally in DenverQuarterly

Oncertain evenings in dark motels, she could transform her lip into the edge ofthe bottle, imagining her face was made of amber glass and the men paused aboveher only to take a drink of breath. Over the years, men drank and drank until there were only two sips leftinside. They began sucking the airout of the glass that grew warm in the wrong places because of heat radiatingoff their hands. The men’s breathalong with white feathers fell over autumn winds drifting through open windows. As the chill receded, hands and dryleaves glided over shadows mingling and flitting above.  Girls woke to conformed arrangements ofbottlenecks, brittle stems of wineglasses shattered on the balcony stairs.  Witness to her own departure in hazymirrors, she would seek herself in other women, their singsong voices echoingthrough chimneys of the houses she had left behind, fingers tracing the railsof the locked stairwell. Recallingthe perfume drifting through dark halls, the way scent caught in curtains alongwith silence, she found more intricacy and misconceptions in common things –bottles, hands, and leaves – than in labyrinths designed for deliberateconfusion, as in a crowded subway, passages leading onto passages.  Leaves became refuse in the winter,raked into piles for burning. Inthe heat of flames, one could drink from a cold bottle and still bethirsty. Looking at the leaves,one could spit brandy into the fire and watch it flare, turning old magazinesand newspapers into black feathers lost on the wind. Like a fortuneteller, one could rub coal into the creases ofa woman’s hands to tell her age during the years when she was still alive.  Shuffling through black and whitephotographs littered with occasional sepia tones like ash on broken glass,women feared her, saying she was a man because she loved them so.