Re: Second Floor
A week ago, this would have been more jarring. By now, the girl in the dress that clung like the skin-stalk of a tulip to her body was nearly relieved. She was not pleased, but perhaps relieved. Her little white-gold curls bounced as she swept like grace through the cleaved heart of the mall. (What a word that was. A promenade, palm-lit, smile-shined, and spat clean on the enamel of the tiles underfoot.) She was a beauty, a swan who never knew the same of the ugly duckling, and the world was her emerald pond, a pearl in the palm of her twilled hand. She was soft, skin creamy, nubile as a blossom begging to erupt into full bloom—everything a woman need be to bring man to his knees while she was on hers.
It was upstairs, past the parade of pie-eyed people and ghosts, that she saw that smile slicing through the air, a fresh, wet tendril sprung from the plant potted beneath it. Her own smile peeked out in reflection, she the lake, it the moon. She was not naive to the ways of a free-floating smile. A girl of the world, was she.
A bloodlust welling in butcher's red in her chest left her heart trilling. Her lips were perfectly pink when the little chirruping smile evolved into a pouted moue; the smile birthed a man as pretty as she. Her eyes went wide in fascination or obsession. How does one tell one glassy gaze from the next? Obsession, addiction, fascination, or, my, nothing at all.
The careful beadery of her dress made a sad lullaby of her gait. She brushed up against the tall man.