Some people keep big digits real close for a price, the Television grumbled as the old man guzzled his Dos Eqius and whimpered stroking grey bristles and stubble giving way to curls above his pock marked face.
“I need some ice. Fix me another drink,” He commanded.
“I couldn’t quite keep the rows of danger columns of pressed anger tired subtleties and murmured dreams unhinged and abandoned in a mask or murmur hems and haws,” the television blared utter nonsense.
“It’s in the freezer, nitwit,” the woman answered her large sagging breasts’ nipples protruded down a threadbare green tank top as she motioned with her head and returned to reading the English Spanish dictionary’s Miriam Webster edition.
“How do you say Concha?”
“What?”
“Turn down the volume!”
The TV glared, flashing plasma dreams in an incandescent flicker pulsating between reds, browns, whites, and blues in an inconsistent tempo. At times it would flash rapidly towards a cold face that sat entranced numb mind blank fixated on a thousand things the TV’s story colors and shapes and nothing at all simultaneously.
“Did you fucking hear me? Turn that down!”
Across hall swung closed the gate which opened onto a stale smelling putrid whiff between the black-brown dirty hardwood floor and the couches stained from a dozen house parties beer foam and puke gathered together with mildew left to mold over for weeks under pillow cases and neatly folded laundry which never seemed to be put away.
Outside the city lights cast an orange haze upwards as they reached up in one song of burning coat oil and natural gas to flood out the twinkling fair starlight still shining on the city streets and dreams of a child drifting to sleep inside.
“What?”
“Turn the shit off! I’m trying to concentrate!”
“Yeah, just a minute babe. This is the good part. They’re about to catch the killer.”
“You flabbergasting sack of turd turn that shit down before I shove this book in your mouth you dumb nit wit!”
“Hey, cool it babe. Go back to your book. I’m watching TV.”
She raised a crumpled white shirt sitting on the table and tossed it at him. Part of a sleeve feel in a glass he was drinking a brown sugared liquor from.
“What are you doing! You ruined your shirt. Don’t make me spill this here.”
The little girl in her room thought and pondered as she lay breathing deeply. She clutched a ragged brown and green stuffed turtle close to her chest and sighed.
“It’s all so lonely in here. All that fighting in the living room drowning out the roar of the television. I wish if only a little starlight could whisk me a way into a fairy tale of dreams and fantasies. I’d float dancing around and around stepping from star to start cloud to cloud and drift back home to my warm comfortable peaceful life.
Not like the TV that’s always the center of attention.
What would it be like to dream, to hear the sounds of water rippling over rock piles in a sanguine stream perched by sagging branches of willows a oaks. Green foliage shimmering sunlight falling like maple leaves descending down to the musk, clean, crunchy forest floor,” the girl mused.
“I would sit and throw small stones into the stream, watch spiders weave their nets above the nooks and muddy eddies where flies and mosquitos spawn, where minnows dance in the cool mountain water soothing the blistered and red rubbed raw toes and ankles of little girls after playing all day along the valley park’s trails and tributaries.
Plop. Plop. Plop. I would throw stones, everything else peaceful, but for the faint crackle of a twig branch breaking as my momma, my real momma, gathered wood for a campfire.
Tonight, we’re cooking peach cobbler and smores, marshmallows and chocolate on graham crackers, all oozing together in a sugary warm goodness.” Her tummy grumbles she can almost taste it.
Crash! A dish hit the wall, fell, cracked, and shattered. There were loud voices screeching, a holler, a thud. The TV went quiet suddenly in a low moping whimper.
The little girl sighed, held her stuffed turtle tight, and drifted to sleep. There were small creatures with green hats and flowing brown beards, scurrying in matching uniforms hopping jumping and twirling through a conveyor over bars and platforms by a trail or set of moving clouds topped by green grass. Through the grass turtles trudged alongside the green hatted creatures performing cartwheels clutching briefcases with gold bar locks and hinges. It was all very magical and strange, they were all scurrying towards something, a cliff or sudden end, an overhang or rock outcropping, the end of childhood or the free fall into womanhood. They free fell not a furnace red throbbing yellow reddish-purple light collapsing and clanging with steel chomping mouths to crush all the little elves or leprechauns and turtle shells into a bright yellow stew of molten river.
She woke in a sweat. Her knuckles were bright white and clutched the stuffed animal tightly almost so much that her turtle’s ear ripped from a loose thread stretched tight. Her blanket seemed clammy and wet so she threw it off and stared at the iron bars and the faint yellow somber light of the street light shining like a sentry outside casting silhouettes of shadows of trees, poles, and posts across the parking lot outside her window.
“What shadows does the night hide? Are the windows iron bars keeping bad things out or good ideas from sprouting and taking root? What were those creatures with green hats? Why was everyone happily dancing away to their death? Was it even death or a new beginning returning to the metallic earth’s source to be forged anew?” She thought and wondered.
The child sighed clutched her blanket and shivered as a gust of wind, a chilly blue-white breathe, seemed to push across the room, expand in its middle to envelope her toys, dirty discarded clothes, and a bookcase containing dolls and a few children’s books, before disappearing under her bed.
She felt warm all of a sudden. A red purple haze, an animated squiggle or radiating lines, permeated her mattress and wrapped her in comfort. The TV was quiet. The racket subsided. She gazed forward beyond the banisters and rails that separated the bed frame from her mattress, the floor, and that blue-white gust of wind’s presence as she clutched her nighty blanket closer, drawing in the warmth of her own body heat and vivid imagination.
“At least here I’ll be safe. I’ll be safe here until morning,” She thought as she closed her eyes once more and the vision of the steel jaws eating green hat midgets dissipated as the turtles in the grass pressed on into the sand of the beach to lay eggs, blue white eggs, in little piles carved into the sand by scrawling reptilian tiny claws over and over and over again, burying them into the beach in big mounds of dirt and sand and tiny pebbles. There were blue, pink, white, brown, and even green pebbles, sprinkled decoratively on mounts of tan beach sand from which tiny little tortoises would crawl. They crawled out, descending in long parallel lines in the big black-grey-green swell of ocean. The sea stretched endlessly in turbulent waves of frothy white foam, to live and die to float and paddle away. Away from the beach, from the mounds of eggs tended by mother out and about towards the unknown, towards survival, towards new beaches, new mounds, and even, shudder, to death.
Was she a baby turtle? The little girl wondered. Would she live a turtle life, paddling out into an endless ocean? And there she was—a turtle. A little baby turned around and seemed to twist and contort herself to travel the opposite way washed up on the shore waddling towards familiar mounds of sand, burying herself in a mound of dirt and multicolored pebbles, and dreaming. The baby turtle fell asleep wrapped in the cracked wreck of a baby turtle eggshell, falling asleep in the slime and goo where a baby turtle had hatched before.
She dreamed the turtle’s dream of water. Water currents flowing ebbing back and forth across the ocean’s width, and swimming. Swimming those tiny turtle strokes submerged beneath the roar and ruckus of the sea’s surface. Quiet and serene, calm and peaceful, with plenty of tiny specs of turtle food to bite at, and she dreamed the turtle dream dreaming and up she went for air, and she was in a mound of sand in a cracked shell, and she poked her head out the mound of sand and her sisters had all swum off.
She woke again and glanced at the streetlight standing sentry, flooding white yellow light at the asphalt and concrete below outside her iron bar window. The girl clutched her stuffed animal, the green turtle with the greenish brown squishy shell, and drifted off again.
She woke without dreaming. It was almost morning.
Her stomach growled.
It was almost time to rise. To open the door. To face the chaos in front of the television again.