Gloria sits in the laundry room watching a tornado filmed in the garment district roll in the drier. Reggie is in the closet listening to air leak on earphones plugged into an inner tube. Arturo looks sternly into the sky and tosses himself on his hands. He performs fifty rapid push ups, rises with slow dignity, feels his muscles, smiles, and crosses himself. Before I can ask him to clap, Arturo walks away, murmuring the murmur of an erratic wind through a barbed wire fence. Mark can't clap because his hands won't listen. They are in dependent, the way Mark has taught them. He is proud of his hands without clapping. The rest of the guests are drifting toward medication.

Her fingernails are painted pig's feet. She sings to the lavender Cadillac gliding through the motel gates. The acrid blend of cheap perfume and cigarettes. This morning Mrs. Sparks is the Medusa. A line of Christmas bulbs surround the Blue Motel midway between the first and second floors. A monster in a cotton muumuu paces the balcony like a snowman with the Himalayas on its mind. Muriel's mouth is sewn with alum flavored thread stitched through nicotine--deprived gums causing her to salivate more than usual, squirting involuntary water from beneath her tongue and wisdom teeth when she talks. Tight frenetic temples. Vision shallow and two-dimensional. A world depressed and silent.



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