Laura Secord

Laura Secord

Neon yellow baskets and bobble-headed super-boys and super-girls with primary colored wrapper bags line lonely, beige walls, while brightly jeweled chocolates take refuge behind clear, thin display glass. In the back, and old white meringue woman diddles in a sparkling menagerie of pink and orange ice cream labels. The gold lettering lures sugar-craving eight-year-old hands, while chestnut-filled eyes peer over the moon-glass countertop, parents unfolding crisp ten-dollar bills for two scoops of ice cream.

Lined green racks send drafts of minted sweets out to the hallways, where, making a right when reaching pale, smooth tile, they can tempt women, who, despite their obsessions with being thin, vow that with enough swooping through shops the carbs won’t stick to their thighs.

If the scent makes a left it’ll pass closed, furrowed shutters and hundreds of unique-time clocks. Even this multitude of dials and screws can’t buy more time for the white-haired ice-cream vendor. Within the shadows of mega-hit game stores and food court Japanese cuisine no one rustles a care for her temptations.

Temptations are restricted to candies and chocolate.

Go left again, where young black women debate between blue-striped purses and cheetah-print handbags; where young mob-dressed men talk of skateboards and girlfriends. Old men, stuffed four to a bench share stories of past wars, now wars and what-if wars. Their grandchildren play in three-wheeled shopping carts with McDonalds poster seats.

All have stories dancing on their tongues, all have dance partners to curl around, move into, throw over their heads to watch their eyes fire-fly glow in wonder.

A duet they sore, a soloist she tumbles through a cream-luster nightmare, for she has stories parading in her mouth, swelling in her eyes, playing freeze-tag in her stomach…

… a single streak of blue-green strides across her vision. Between discussions of Wal-Mart merchandise and the jostles of nearby customers sat a young-manned illusionist, scribbling in a covert black book; cross-legged on an otherwise empty bench. With matted hair, shock-stirred eyebrows, salvation army jeans and a crisp green-and-white top she seemed a blue-and-green lioness, oblivious to the stereotypical waves churning past. To all else, her teenage hands moved, unsculpted against time.

A small child’s shoe in a barren ocean commoners parted from her, moving nearer to the wall with every questioned foot forward. All their souls hiss out at her, catching in her hair like fragmented dragonflies.

They sing gut-wrenching notes at her, purr song-lit lullabies at her; mother to daughter, lover to lover, friend to friend. They breathe stories at her, tales of bitter rivalries, lustful situations, of beloved kin and even more beloved enemies.

All of them must smell of aged rum and burning wheat to the blue-and-green lion girl; for she gets drunk on their fantasies, writing so quickly, so effortlessly, so dangerously that her wrist must burn with the scent of the wheat sheaves she’s emerged from. To the stalk-still ice-cream vendor she is a predator.

This lioness, pen weaving masterpieces, collects subjects in her ever-growing den. The vendor, unlike the haughty women and superstitious men who wander by, does not fear the attacking cat on the lonely bench. Instead, the predator’s motions, as well as her motives interest the eagle-nosed woman; make her frail, wounded-bird bones tense against her paper-mache skin. The honey-eyed ice-cream lady eggs the lioness on, forces her body so tight it seems to keep the creature’s pen moving.

Through parlor fumes and poker-face eyes the veteran worker can feel immortality press through the slits in her fingers. She wonders, through it all, if she can tip the metaphoric panel between the edge of a teal-and-white sea and the edge of a green-hazed room. Freedom haunts her knuckles, her shins, her cheeks, her mind.

She reaches out a diseased hand…

… and the lion-girl stands up, stealing her stories, her accomplishments, her goals. She falls over in the rush of primary colored super-boys and super-girls, of clear, thin display glass.

She no longer pays taxes on time.