Someone on this train is off-gassing last night’s gin. I can smell the used spike of it coming from the bottom of someone’s lungs, the last acid swipe vaporizing out of pores. The guy behind me seems a little unsteady on his feet, I wonder if it is coming from him. I turn my head to look. He has close cropped ginger colored curls and that’s something I could learn to like, if he could learn to stop p/a-ing me for more space by nudging me with his shoulder bag.

She is not blond, the adjective, but blond, the verb. Blonded, vari-colored, a Brighton Beach Holly Golightly, substitute Odessa for Oklahoma. Her eyes are at half mast, heavily kohled to hide last night. She working on the last of her brief shelf life, and the pink tank top, pink hair clip, pastel beads draped over the aggressively engineered forward thrust of her small breasts are both a vigorous flag of availability and a thin veneer of femininity to hide the calculations under the skin.

It has been days since I have seen something innocent or surprising or well-worn, or best, all three together, and I am starting to feel a bit desperate. Look up, and the blue sky frames an empty flag pole, the cheap utilitarian 1970’s style lampposts, what was once a proud grand opening banner now just half eaten flapping triangles of colored plastic. Even the roses in the park are done, gone tired and soft, wilting and wrinkling without even the energy to fall to the ground. I pass a trick bike chained to the fence. On one of the stunt pegs, written in White-Out, is the single word: holla. That will have to do for now.