She said, “I’m leaning in the doorway.”
She was leaning in the doorway, making a casual perch of
the white, ogeed lumber. Her left shoulder was pressed to the
door post; her head was applied to the same fixture; her feet
were drawn close together, the left arch over the right instep,
nuzzling with their knuckles all clad in their woolen socks; her
left ham and calf were slightly flamingoed; the right hip was
cocked over the rigid right knee; her arms were crossed.
He was putting on his shoes, but this was not long in the
doing for he wore a pair of clunky Chelsea boots with elastic
sides. In their sheen, they caught an electric glow like the
yellow walls did from the bulb, which hung on a simple halter
encircled at the top by a molded chaplet of garlands in the
plaster ceiling; one can only hope men will glow thus and be
praised and garlanded when in turn their necks will become
shattered.
After her short, thoroughly truthful, proper, and correct
declaration, not to mention arch, humorous, and equally thought
provoking, if only because she was trying to be obvious as a
joke, she brought her head upright from its languid repose and
stared at him. She tucked her chin, tried to make her expression
neutral, then letting her head sink a little, chin strike forth,
her neck arc forward, she relaunched the offensive. With
suppressed grin, with feigned boldness, and the make-pretend was
what she needed to be bold, she recommenced to try to stare him
out of countenance.
Now he grabbed his red puffer from the hook. “I’m just
watching you as you redon your coat,” she spoke again, with
alacritous eyes and swaying chin. “It says a lot about a man,
the way he dresses himself for the cold.”
Almost in concert to his zipping up his jacket in the
resounding confines of the vestibule, from behind her back,
guests still at table began to laugh.
“Happy birthday once again,” he said.
“Thank you,” she replied. “It was really a week and a half
ago.” She meant the real date of her birth, fancifully altered
for the sake of the party, a good party at that.
“It was a good party,” he said, then hesitated.
Canary yellow walls, rosy light bulb; the vestibule glowed
like a bowl of humble, stewed red pulse next to piles of
never-circulated coin and burnished urns in Ali Baba’s cave. Her
hair dyed a shiny copper color was like a fire you could stare
at forever because the picture always changed. Sometimes she
looked composed, sometimes fluttered, sometimes mirthful,
sometimes fearful when he stared back at her, 8…9…10, too long.
“What is it?” she asked, still leaning in the doorway,
because he had forgotten to say goodbye, turn on his heel, and
depart through the door he’d have to shut behind himself.
Zeke Greenwald is a poet from Pittsburgh, PA. His poems have appeared in the Columbia Journal, Prelude, the Opiate, and other well meaning, but practically bankrupt rags. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.
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