Oxygen by Annabel Lyon

Oxygen by Annabel Lyon

Author:Annabel Lyon [Lyon, Annabel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-605-9
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2003-04-01T00:00:00+00:00


RUN

Every time the bus started to move, the driver turned off the fluorescent lights. Then the inside of the bus was the same colour as the outside, but warmer. It pulled from block to block, dragging the city, heading for the last run when it could stop and everyone would go.

The girl reached a couple of fingers into the inside pocket of her jacket and fingered a bus ticket, a quarter, a tampon. An inch of paper, a metal disc, a cotton bullet – that was how she had been thinking about things lately. It was later than late and she was on her way home.

“Honey?” the fat man said. “Is that you?”

She had not seen him get on.

The fat man sat down next to her, sealing her against the window. He had scars on his chin which were almost invisible because of his fatness. The scars came from a can opener. He received them in his youth, he had said, but that was past. Now he was fat and gentle and not really to be feared. She had stayed awake all the first night, just in case, but there had been no need. A week later – bored, nervous – she had left.

“Where are you living now?” he asked.

For the past month she had lived with two other people on the top floor of a hundred-year-old house. The girl had crucifixes tattooed on the soles of her feet and a yellow cat. The boy was a gardener and smelled of sweat and pine trees. They were strangers and the house was their shell.

“How are the fish?” she asked. The fat man kept black mollies.

“Pining for you.”

She remembered him feeding them food dust from a shaker. After he fed them he would tip his head back and tap some into his own mouth. Once she asked him what it was like.

“Tangy,” he said.

She had left home when she felt she would always be capable of securing for herself milk and warm bread, and sometimes coffee and apples. She had bought a flute, deep downtown, in a toy shop slipped between a sex boutique and the fluttering glow of an arcade. The flute squirted a clear tone like a small brown bird. She had sat cross-legged on the pavement like a girl Buddha under the ball lights of a marquee, holding the toy flute in her fingertips. That was where the fat man found her. Later when he became troublesome she bought a brown paper envelope in a shop that sold things for skin. Inside the envelope was a smaller plastic bag and inside the plastic bag was black powder. She washed her hair with the powder and it left a dirty wet rinse around the sink and when she flipped her head back to confront the mirror she looked pale and milky-sweet with her new dark hair. But he had found her anyway, just stepped on a bus and found her. She realized she had been foolish to suppose she could evade a fat man’s love just by changing her colours.



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