borrow

From this distance her feet make no sound on the asphalt. It's disconcerting. I can see the sweet orthopedic roundness of her sneakers moving too closely to the ground to be silent. I can hear him talking of course. If I looked over I'd see his blue eyes aflame and his red hair glowing with the rush of whatever his mouth is saying. The action has a sound. But there is no sound to shadow her cheap shoes. Shuffle alone, no scrape.

I can hear cars rushing forward in their near-gravitational necessity to get where they are going faster, sooner, first. Maybe they are pulling her sound away with them. Maybe that sad shuffle has hitch hiked it's way into happier shoes.

Above the sneakers are the remnants of two long, pencil written notes, scrawled on brown paper sacks. They've been folded and unfolded a thousand times by clammy hands; probably crumpled up and regretted, thrown out by hands of hesitancy. Two brown paper notes, pasted around her ankles to the place where slender calves used to sunbathe on afternoons like these, some two-score years ago. You can see her dreams were written on it once.

But those ankles, even wrapped in all that worry-loosened paper turned tired silk-shirt skin, are too small. She's still a child under it. Ankles that small can't be anyone else's.

I can't look at ankles that small shuffling so close to the ground. . Things that tiny should think they could fly. She's wrapped up in that old wish-paper from head to toe. I know it's there, under a thick kitty sweater, out of place under this blaze. She's pulled it close around her: a blanket against the chill of her loss. Unjustly huddled under so many crumpled promises. It is an ill fitting garment, sewn for another.

She's only three feet from me now, and finally I'm found the scraping like snowshovels, scooping away the drudgery piled in front of each of her steps. Her sigh shakes out of her chest, and shakes the world.

I am not comforted by this arrival, but I know she should be.

Those tiny hands should be held. I should remind her she is a child. It's never happened to me, but I know how it happens. I know how I would scoop her bone china skeleton into my arms and pull her in. I would breathe her in to show her that I am unafraid of the cold, waiting aroma of time passed. Forehead to forehead she could see the absence of fear in my eyes. My bravery would vaccinate me against the hysterical fear of the age epidemic. I would kiss each of her knotted knuckles until my anxious breath loosened the knots in them. I would look in her eyes and seek out the place un-hidable in her eyes. I would wait until she felt the strength to lift her feet.

I would lay her so close to me that she could pretend again that my unlined shoulders were hers, and she could convince herself that the pallor of my freckeled skin was the tangible evidence of her innocense restored to her. She could have for all those elongated seconds the unlabored breathing of my chest, transferred to her, and the unmitigated glow of all my potential for as long as one can hold an old woman in a parking lot, without having the authorities called. I would not correct her. I would plump her with my youth, and pet her cheek until the burning rush of my own circulation had ironed away the days from her face.

My body would be her body.I would not shift impatiently, or brush away the flakes of her age from my dress. She could look into me, as if I were a mirror, and imperfect as I might be, return might retouch me with the softness of an implied, pretended nostalgia.

I would not promise her my life, or renewal. But I would stay long enough to see the first two steps after she left my arms appear as if they were in preparation for flight.

Unto our nuclei we would belong to each other. I would give that to her. Because I see ther child's ankles, and I know her hunger. Because she knows my weariness.

But she's not looking. And I've no voice for calling out and no breath. The ten, now twelve feet flight from my lips is impossible.

I'm sorry.