Ella Dean is a (chanteuse) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2014-01-05 04:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | white rabbit |
Who: Ella Dean
What: Small changes. Small choices.
When: Recently.
Warnings: Nada
She held the slot in her heart, like carrying around a lit candle, hands cupped around the fragility of a flame that couldn’t - shouldn’t - be alight. It was warm bloom beneath her breastbone the day she went in after Christmas and saw the ‘closing’ sign in red letters through glass, the books behind it spread out like nothing had changed at all. She held it in as the owner with sad eyes that looked like she meant all the sorries she said, told her about the accounts, about how much property went for in this city, about how many people used Amazon and how it ate into her bottom-line. Ella held it all the way through her eyes stinging on the bus-ride home.
She sat at the counter with the newspaper in front of her and she thought about bills and rent and diapers and ran it in counterpoint, descant to her own inevitable failure. She thought about auditions and unfamiliar bright lights, and standing on stage in countless clubs, for two minutes (or thirty seconds, some of the girls at the club she’d worked were trying to make it big) chasing down a dream that had seemed practically possible lying on the comforter with her feet in Coop’s lap and her head cradled in pillows, looking at the cracked ceiling of their New York apartment like they were counting off stars that were theirs to reach out and hold.
And she held that one slot warm in her heart, like an ember of something that should have been crushed right out.
She found the job the second day, walking on tennis shoes that had cracked a little, plastic splitting up the sides and one of the old dresses worn beneath one of the new-old shirts, flannel with someone else’s name stitched over her heart, unbuttoned over soft worn cotton the same color as the inside curl of a shell. Before the closed sign and the conversation, it was how she felt these days. The same, and different. Michael had said it wouldn’t be the same forever and she hadn’t believed one bit of it, but she’d shaken out cotton skirts and the hair that had been cut to her chin had begun to straggle down to collarbones, blond curls same as those on Beth’s head. She kissed Beth once and she handed her over to the new babysitter with the old pinch of fear between her shoulderblades, the now what? singing along nerve endings.
The new place wasn’t good. It wasn’t bad. It was short-order food put up hot and greasy and made for people looking to fill up cheap, who counted their singles one by one and didn’t throw down a twenty for a meal and walk out without their change. She’d wondered for a minute if the cook in back was Michael, but the man was short and he was loud and he talked so much she didn’t need to know his name to know he wasn’t at all. There was a uniform, polyester-cotton that crackled when she took it out of the dryer, but no one was taking clothes off and places like this didn’t go out of business. The new place wasn’t good. But it was generous with shift-patterns, time re-arranged for auditions, unfamiliar lights and all. And she had that slot, folded up like a love-letter and tucked next to her heart.