Addict

There is a man up the street. He is lanky, and rugged, and his dark eyes flicker between intelligence and ignorance. He prefers the latter. He has a funny sideways way of looking at me when I play with my brother in our driveway, he wants my reassurance. But I cannot give it to him. I see that he is a man who likes to laugh. When his friends come to visit they stand in his driveway smoking cigarettes and laughing. His gestures become very dramatic, a caricature of his lanky scarecrow outline, and his eyes try to cling to the intelligence. They can’t. Because he spends so much time trying to blink it out when his friends aren’t around.

I don’t see much of his wife. She would not attract my attention at all—and I think she tries to make herself that way—if it weren’t for the night my brother and I saw her pass out on her front walk. We were supposed to be in bed, but we were sitting on the roof sharing ghost stories instead. A white car drove up to our neighbor’s house, and she wobbled out. She stood in her driveway smoking a cigarette before she tried to go in, she didn’t look well. The cigarette kept missing her mouth, and once or twice I saw her burn a hole in her long skirt. The moon was bright, but it was hard to see her standing there on the driveway. Her pale glowing face was there, the orange ember on the cigarette kept floating up to it, her body and cigarette were very solid images, but her gestures weren’t. It was very hard to focus on her because the garage door behind her gave off more of an aura. She is a woman who does not try to be anything but her circumstances, and it is hard to see her. 

She fell when she turned to go in. Something went wrong with the way she turned, she forgot to move this foot or that foot, and she landed on her side without letting out a single sound. 

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