by Karl Green
Her eyes were disappearing in her head, taking on the color of the pavement. There was a soft monotonous hum rising up from her throat, the way soft music and fragments of conversations rise up and hum from the corners of dark cafes, where the evening light twirls in orgies of dust onto bar-tops in shotgun rooms with floors like old-time barbers’. You know, that sound spun from caves at the doors of the world. Beyond her eyes, orange-blue clouds like the incandescent lungs of deep sea creatures were colliding in the dusk, where this woman was being carried into an ambulance on a stretcher. The expanding pool of blood on the sidewalk was like a mirage of some limitless amaranthine room, with curtains hung so black they make you feel invisible. When her soul left her body latin music was blasting from a parked car nearby and some pedestrians were smoking cigarettes. I remember how the smoke danced between their faces like the wind-blown cob-webs in the door frames of the old municipal buildings crowding the block. And there was this woman, motionless, laid out upon a stretcher, baring an expression that to me, looked like unequivocal relief, deliverance, as though she had just reached the end of some water-less desert.