Here Lies Memory - The Pittsburgh Trilogy Book 1 by Doug Rice

Author:Doug Rice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Scat Books
Published: 2018-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Up and down the avenue, in and out of the shadows, walked the girls—the true-to-life girls, the would-be girls, the if-only girls, the once-upon-a-time-I-was-that-young girls. The elderly, the nearly too youthful, the girls who clearly knew better. Boys walked the avenue, too, or they leaned against streetlamps. Beautiful boys. Fair and tender boys. They made their way into and out of cars. All night long, deep into the early morning. Everything imaginable was permitted along the backstreets or in the side streets of the North Side. More than everything imaginable was permitted in the alleys. A tragic end awaited nearly every one of these girls and boys, and every girl and boy was aware of it. Felt it near to their skin.

Sylvia wanted to escape such an ending. She felt that she knew more about how to control her body than most other girls. She did not so much work the street as simply walk it, moving her feet from here to there. She knew she did not mean anything by any of what she did in those lonely front or backseats of those cars smelling of cigarettes, fast food, and beer. She hid nothing beneath or inside her movements. Each touch was simply and precisely that, a touch. Each word was merely that, a word. Nothing more. Nothing less. She held back her unspoken dreams of a place where she could love what she chose to love, in whatever ways she needed.

Every desire has some relation to madness. Desires invent new desires, and Sylvia believed the worst desire of all was the desire to be loved. The more anyone believed in their desire, the more they thought it real, the more it forbade them from ever coming to know it. Sylvia thought love forbade you from ever being loved. She knew that you could never go out looking for love, that love was something that broke into you. Love tore down your walls, broke bones, paralyzed you. It knocked you off your feet. Made you beg some unknown god to help you begin breathing again. Love didn’t just penetrate you; it got inside you and it stayed. It tugged and yanked at you. You became it.

Sylvia never risked revealing any of those beliefs or any of her other beliefs to anyone. Even when men asked her to tell them her dreams. She only told them what they had convinced themselves they wanted to hear. She gave them their own secrets back to them, without them even knowing she was doing that. She would tell them, “Beg.” She would say: “Suffer.” She would say, “Yes”; unless she felt they needed to hear her say, “No.” She would say, “Touch me here and there and here again. Yes.” And she would say, “Again.” And her voice would be soft. And her eyes would close almost as if she had done nothing to close them. And the men would go about finishing what they thought they had started.

Sylvia told those men she had to leave home.

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