Iron Hot

         We live on in my heart as a nightmare…unbidden, most times, but at other times I am forced to conjure it for the others. It is their delicious fantasy, somehow, my running hard and fast but never quite escaping you. They hold me down hard and shake me by the shoulders, by the hips, demanding to hear the tale dribble from my lips over and again while they take me with eyes glazed and roaming over every twist of fate.

         We met at the laundry. Remember? I was the only one with glasses – red-rimmed, shiny little spectacles. You called me Sarah Palin and we laughed like we two strangers had a secret. Me, some minimum wage laundress in an upscale sweat shop, quite literally. It was June in the south and everything stuck to everyone – the thin plastic bags that swirled around and snatched stickily at us as we scurried to the front, loaded down with hangars of stiff clean dressy casuals, stray hairs that snaked into our eyes no matter how carefully we scraped them into long swinging pony tails – all of us had long hair, strange coincidence. And, our  thin summer dresses stuck hard onto our sweaty bodies and gave way to the secret that it was far too hot for even underwear – we were all quite tiny, too…another funny thing. You liked that. Remember? You asked after each of them by name, if each she truly really went without whatever silky scraps might pass for panties underneath. We were sipping wine and listening to jazz at the top of the world and it didn’t seem like such a crime to tell you, who so likes his secrets – so very like the one you tried and failed to make of me.

         What could you have told her to have minted yet another poacher after my very soul? Avoiding you was easier – she was by far the harder one to shake. I often wondered what you hoped I might have to do, what I would be driven to and how excited you yourself became at the very thought of having brought her to such a brink and then pointed her straight at me. Soulless manipulator to an army of puppet whores. Tell me, are you excited? Should I continue before you have to shake me to get me to tell you more?