post-Gershwin melancholy

The wind-chilled fibers of the car seat prickle my back like sea anemone; like hair folicles shocked straight by goosebumps; something which should be warm, but has turned frigid and spiritless. Your small white hands are folded cleanly like two linen napkins, but I see the way your fingertips clutch the inside of your palm. My hands clench and unclench around the soft edge of the seat. The two of us sit all looming and silent like after a funeral, like something has died, but we can't quite put our finger on what it is. Behind the warm gauze of the subwoofers lulls a stagnant silence.

Three dozen teenagers in tap shoes and stage make-up invade the calm conscience of the asphalt parking lot like plain-clothes police officers, cradling alternate identities in their chest. The last of the audience has gone, marking the lot with a dully empty echo; with gaudy strips of streamers trailing the black hardtop; with the waxy shells of empty gum wrappers and yellow paper candy boxes.

The sky is not black like velvet or like skin, but like funeral garments. The trees wave their branches like melodramatic aunts in mourning, I think, and I gaze angrily at them because they do not really care.

I feel like the leaves, which I know to be all salmon and yellow and rust-colored, but now look like tired newspaper-cutouts, hanging limply and silently in the charcoal-tinted haze of early morning. Above our heads a streetlamp bulb fizzles and flickers, struggling for a moment, and exhausts. The outline of a printed program, propped wearily against the cold metal of the railing, crackles with the light and turns black.

The time flashes out all green and flourescent from the dashboard but the numbers are all slurred together like an unintelligable accent. The moon has hatched far above our heads, its mottled dimples smiling on a scene split by a sound sense of vacancy.

A tight ache sets into my scalp, protesting four hours housing several dozen bobby pins. I fear that if I remove them, the rest of the world will unravel with the cold pin-curls of my hair.