Exeunt

I left the attic yesterday. For the first time in a month. My skin had grown sallow--the smudge-eyed man who stared back at me from the mirror was a stranger--and I was in desperate need of the sun's warmth. In 30 minutes I had developed a second-degree sunburn, but I slathered my forehead with some sampler aloe from the Co-op nearby and continued my stroll. I hadn't felt heat like this in ages, and there were clumps of children everywhere, frolicking in the filthy snow piles crowding the curb. A few paused to pelt me with curses and brownish missives, but I didn't hold it against them. I must have looked rather odd, in my overcoat and shorts with no socks.

I didn't realize I had a destination until I arrived. The Stephens-Lee gymnasium. I'd heard that years ago, when it was still a school, Nina Simone had been a student. I imagine she had a rough time of it--she once famously claimed that she would never return to North Carolina, under any circumstances. Still, I wanted to go inside, to walk through the same halls she once had, and see if some of her haunting voice might inhabit me, if only for a minute. The front doors were locked, so I poked around the periphery testing door handles, even walking down some steep stairs to try the janitor's entrance, with no luck. As I came back around the front of the building, I heard the strangest tobacco-fed cackle coming from behind a tall white pine.

I tracked the laughter to its source, and found a gray-haired woman in a jumpsuit shooting baskets. The fenced-in court was lined with cracked concrete, almost certain to snap my fragile ankles, but for some reason, when she invited me to a game, I accepted immediately. What followed was a sound drubbing. Tara had a sailor's mouth and a wicked crossover, and she humiliated me for twenty-one straight points, only pausing to make jokes at my haircut's expense. She dribbled through my legs, over my head, off of my ass, and she did it all with the nimble grace of a dancer. I began to think she might be some sort of charmed creature, that if I kissed her, she would shed her costume and reveal herself as a gorgeous woodnymph. But when I came close to her face, she pulled off an improbable turnaround jumper that landed her foot directly in my testicles, shouted "Game," and sauntered off, into the edible gardens.