Cradle

At about 8:08 in the evening, Meg made a call.  She had passed two pay phones on the way home.  and the booths had been an inviting blue.  Their isolation appealed to her: at the edge of a dark, abandoned parking lot, or leaned against a disheveled  billboard on the edge of town.  A third stood defiantly.  The broken green and blue glass of some speculated altercation sparkled like emeralds and sapphires all around on the ground.  

The marooned Cadillac sat motionless at the unpaved entrance of a neon-advertised trailer park.  The double wides inside the chain link fence were aglow with the television's icy stare.  She had gone through her purse a couple times hoping to find a cigarette.  The habit is filthy but the habit has its place.  Today, on this dark landscape, under the green glow of a restless mermaid,  Meg craved nicotine like love or smack.

She sat with it for five minutes, an itchy impatience, as if the goose bumps (the air was too cool or her skin was too thin) were on fire, running amok, shooting amps and volts, blue lightening out the tips of her fingers.  Her bright pink nails clicked on the black casing of the phone, enamel on plastic.  There was a brand of hysteria whistling down her nerves...stopping...just short of picking up the receiver and beginning to dial. 

Her index finger with its cleft in the sculpted nail--a flaw she was yet to notice, another disappointment waiting to be revealed--found the four and pulled it down.  There was promise in the familiar clicks and in the rattle of the dial itself.  Then the five.  The two was followed by a guilty pause.  Her conscience was enveloping her like the poignant chemistry of her perfume.  Decisively, she stretched the mechanism and dialed zero.  Another pause.  Another zero.  The wheel was cocked.  The chamber of her throat was loaded with an armory of arguments, a militia of judgment and venom.  

Retracting the accusatory finger, she released the wheel and placed the phone back in its cradle.  "He is just a baby," she thought, "best not wake him."  Let him sleep, let him sleep.  Let the stunned residents of The Siren's Isle pass out belching pizza and beer.  Let the caddy slip into the car port.  Let her lithe and elegant body slip exhausted between the flowered sheets still stained with his semen and a dried pool of her menstrual blood.