Description
Carmelia constantly confused the little hairs on her knuckles for tiny fuses leading to the bottle rocket of her soul. She burnt her fingers bald and even singed some skin into rust blotches with the extra-large matchsticks she used to light her Lucky Strikes. Her fingers were always fiddling with the rosary dangling around her neck, which she constructed in the 7th grade using nothing but speaker wire and cigarette butts, both stolen from her father, like her grey-violet eyes. As she danced, her pupils dilated. The booming music. The record player pushed its needle into to vinyl to make music out of scratching and spinning. With her bowl cut black hair, she look like an over caffeinated boy when seen through her eleventh story window by the line of sight neighbors in the apartment complex across the parkway. Her window was an outward looking canvas framed by the universe on every side. Her rhythmic figure was framed by a plethora of dulling brick and anonymous city windows, by street-lit sidewalks and Christmas colored traffic lights, by the wealthy northern suburbs and the poverty of the Southside, by the seething center of this planet and the light polluted heavens silently moving through the thick violet night sky, and finally, our Carmelia was framed by the margins of this page.
Recommended Citation
O'Rourke, Tommy
(2014)
"Carmelia,"
Manuscripts: Vol. 79
:
Iss.
1
, Article 3.
Retrieved from:
https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/manuscripts/vol79/iss1/3
Included in
Fiction Commons, Illustration Commons, Nonfiction Commons, Photography Commons, Poetry Commons
