Girl Dreaming page 2

The Boston Fiction Festival

Girl Dreaming

Jaimee Wriston Colbert

I can barely remember what it’s like, Neecie says, calling me for the umpteenth time this month. Maine, she sighs, deep drag off her cigarette, Where you can’t see the air.

I cluck my tongue into the phone, loudly I hope, in her ear. Poor Neecie, I chirp, You know, I was just noticing the Maine air this morning, and I do believe it’s got this mauve thing going. Dressed for the fall, but subtle you know, the Calvin Klein of seasons. Calvin’s the only designer’s name I can think of off hand to razz Neecie with; we don’t exactly live the designer life, this part of Maine.

Neecie sniffles, clears her throat. Well you just poke all the fun you want, Cindra, at my expense, but a land that’s flatter than flat with a layer of visible air hunkered on top like it’s pretending to be some sort of actual terrain is not my cup of you-know-what.

That’s what she’s been harping on lately when she calls, how she sees the air in St. Louis. It’s that muggy, she says, A sickly, shivery sort of haze. Especially you can see it at night, she tells me, hovering under the garish street lamps. Neecie reams out words like this whenever she learns one, as if she’s always known it, like she’s been born into the kind of life where these sorts of words are actually spoken. Looks like air you can bite, she says, You’d take in a mouthful, lumpy and grainy as old bread.

Yeah well, I remind her, It’s not like it doesn’t get humid in Maine. Especially in the woods where you lived, remember? Hope, Maine come summer and you used to say you hoped for any other bloody season. That air can be seen too sometimes, just hanging out between the pines.

Neecie doesn’t miss a beat. There’s no woods here, she says, No woods in St. Louis city. You got to go to a special place to even see a clump of pine trees, like the Arboretum, somewhere like that. They call it a Pinery, if you can imagine. Putting trees on display like they’re zoo animals. I’m telling you, Cindra, I look up into all my neighbors’ windows, folks I don’t even know, and every night I see them individual TV sets, flickery blue lights through window blinds that are all the same. They’re watching something, Neecie says, and I’m just sitting outside in the dark, all by lonesome, smoking my smokes. (Neecie’s sure to let me hear this too, her loneliness; she wants me to pity her, as in maybe I should ring her up on the phone once in a while.) What kind of a community is it, I ask you Cindra, divides itself into who watches what on TV? There’s this little cat with big ears comes by, making his rounds. Won’t sit near me though, just squats under the elderberry sometimes, where he can keep an eye on me. Nobody wants to be with him neither. Probably never even had a mother.

That’s impossible, Neecie, I say...