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werewolf
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at two forty six in the morning. when your heart is racing like that, it's exact time, it's never a little past 230 or almost three. it's exactly 2:46 and each second is how hard it is to breathe, how tired you are from running. running down streets that don't lead to his house, trying to lose the cops by losing himself, and his face is still bleeding from that big concrete gluttony that just went down, and he's still seeing the scene as if he'll accidentally sprint into it again: the empty parking lot, the pretense of two gangs of tragically comic misfits, mercenarily dressed and spoken posturing tough, the commitment of a closed fist, the cartoon awe and pop his friend's face made when smashed by someone else, the same exact expression the kid he was wailing on blindly with that bottle made, as if they were just weasels hit with a mallet at some funhouse. and he kept thinking that the only reason he survived was because the weasel face hadn't settled on him yet, but was contagious was in the air. but he's running now, and the more frightening remembrance is chasing him, the quietness at the end, the heavy silence of people sleeping before work and daylight and their usual breakfast, peppered by the feet skittering off like roaches exposed to light, and the light of tomorrow crusting on his dead friend's closed over eyes. but now he's running and his pulse is racing. and that's when he saw her. in the window, the cops off of his tail and even if they weren't he would've stopped. the music is faint and draws him closer. it's 2:46 for her exactly as well, he can tell. she's playing the piano in the window, she's wearing a tanktop, she's wearing long hair, a beautiful face, but it all seems like clothes to him, covering a glow. the music is intricate and slow. and it's only that way because her hands are intricate and slow. the city is filthy outside. he can still smell urine, and even from far away, but he's closer now, he's on top of a dumpster to take a better look, the keys of that piano look so clean. she's angled so you can only see half of her face, half of her back, a profile, never the complete depth. and she's playing piano softly for herself. he wasn't religous, especially not now and the consequences he'd be facing if he was, but it made him think of his mother. not her, but the pictures of mary she used to worship. if god ever were to visit a girl, to impregnate her in some way that was sacred, (a way for instance that didn't share anything in common with the spooged on chlorinated leather of a peepshow booth at 1:34 on a wednesday, businessmen returning to their cars or oddly dressed poor people ambling back to their drink or hotel room or something, both of them tucking their lonliness back into their pants) well then it would be this girl. it was the sight of her that reminded him that his face was smeared with blood. he wiped it. he almost felt he could cry. the music stopped. he looked up. she was looking at him calmly. it was as if they both understood.
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