The Short Stories Of Mila Strictzer (12) "I will be two thousand, five hundred dollars." "Okay, I have brought that much in my purse." "Do you have cash?" "Yes." "Well, we shall begin, then," the man said and grabbed a large needle and began injecting her in three different places in her lips and she could feel the cool fluid enter her lips and, since she was sitting down in front of the mirror that was over the dresser, she tried to see if her lips changed any but she couldn’t tell from the distance. When the man was done, he leaned back and said, "Well, that is it, we are done with that part. Can you remove your clothes now and we will work on your back side." She looked up, surprised, but took her clothes off anyway. She undressed and then stood naked in the mirror as the two men watched. Then the man said, "if you could put your hands on the chair I will begin injecting again." She did that and again, she felt the cool liquid enter her body. When the man was done, he said, "That’s it, we’re all finished. Could you please pay?" So she got her money out of her purse on the dresser and handed the man a large stack of one hundred dollar bills. His face flushed red like a rose on a thorn bush and his eyes got wide as if he had just been dealt a royal flush, and then he began carefully peeling off those hundred dollar bills and slapping them down on the dresser as he counted, "one hundred, two hundred…" She turned to put her clothes back on but before she did, for a second, she saw in the mirror over the dresser the man counting out the money and she saw he was smiling as he was counting and the ends of his smile were a little crooked so that it made his face appear just a little evil looking and she felt a chill run down her back. Then, she said goodbye and left room 421 at the Hilton and drove home. In the car on the way home, she kept looking in the rear view mirror at her lips to see if she saw any difference and she was certain that she could see that they looked a litter nicer; maybe more puffier. At home, she got out of her clothes and looked at herself in the mirror, naked, for a long time. As she studied her body, she could see certain parts were firmer and her lips were more beautiful. Then she felt a little excited. The next day, she went to work and tried to show off her new good looks to everyone. She told her friend, "It worked!" "I told you, Simone. Was it easy?" "Oh, yes, he was very nice and helpful, too." "That’s wonderful. How do you feel now?" "I feel wonderful." "I’m so happy for you, Simone." Everything was fine for a few days but then one day at work when she was putting lipstick on her new lips in the bathroom mirror at work, she noticed with horror that they seemed even more puffier then usual and there seemed to be a small lump that was below her lower lip. So she went home early and the next day called in sick. She stayed in bed for two days, calling in, and occasionally getting up to study her body in the mirror for hours. Her lips had swollen up very large and as the days passed, she noticed some bumps on the back of her legs. So she stayed home the rest of the week and then the following week too and lost her job. They called for her from work but she disconnected the phone. Her friend came over to her house and knocked on her door. She saw her through the peephole but she did not open the door. Her lips got so bad that her whole bottom lip fell over so that it hung all the way down on her chin, just resting there. And the fluid that the man had put into the back of her upper legs began to slowly migrate down her legs and then all the way down to her ankles so that she could not walk because her ankles were just too huge lumps. She would call for food delivery, reaching her hand around the door to pay and spend the days watching the soap operas and at night she would watch TV and cry sometimes. One night, she got the photo album out and turned right away to the same picture of her and her dead husband. She saw again how she looked with his arm around her. But now she could see in the picture that she was happy just to be with him and that she did not care what she looked like at that time. And as she leaned down and looked a little closer at the picture, she realized that both her and her dead husband did not care about anything else except being with each other right then. And then she started to cry and her tears fell on the open pages of the old album and stained the pictures so that their colors soon ran and the images began to fade. When he got out of jail it had been a very hot day. He felt so happy, like a closing of a book. "I can’t get my check from that asshole. Yesterday, I waited for four hours to meet me and the girl, she has lived inside of the same house for at least two years, no school, no nothing and she is suffering now. So today, I can’t even go over there because his father knows if I do, I’ll wind up in jail so I am stuck in between a tight place…" "Boy, look at this line, will ya? Where did all the people come from? Boy, its sure hot out here." "You go ahead." "Oh, thank you. Sure is hot out here." "Oh, yeah. I looked at the weather channel before I left home and it was only ninety-four degrees but the humidity, it was twenty-five percent, so that’s what’s getting us." "Boy, I think I want to go back to Mesquite. I just came down for the weekend to see my boy, you know, but moving around on this darn leg is hard in this heat. I just got my check yesterday." "Sure. We were up there visiting my old man’s sister last week, out there in the desert. My old man, he says, ‘No way I’m moving out here, ain’t no blacks or Mexicans out here.’ So no way we’d move up there. Maybe the reservation, maybe there." "The Paiute? I lived there for five years, one half of me’s tribe." "Oh, right on." The man and a woman with him placed the large microwave and a green plant in the seat next to them. Another man with a plastic bag smiled as he was playing some game. Then to the man with the microwave, he reached into his medium-blue plastic bag and produced a phone that might have been mounted on a wall. He extended one finger, now two, now placing down the phone in his lap and then all five fingers on one hand and two on the other hand. A woman with gray hair pushed her hair with the palm of her hand back inside of a blue bonnet. "You don’t want to date me. I know gangs, the Crips and the Bloods, ha ha." "No, I’m saying I do." "No no." "Yeah, yeah." "I would fuck you up. I have special powers." "That’s right." "When?" "I left LA to get away from my family. It’s a world where you’re brought down slowly, day by day, until there’s nothing left anymore." "Really?" "I couldn’t take it anymore." "Fourteen." "I’m almost there now, Friday’s cool. I’ll see you on the other side." In a park across the street at the stop, deep under some trees that seemed to hang down a ways, and the sun was at just that angle to make an image almost too good, surreal, a man was leaning back against a table, sitting on the bench and resting his elbows on the concrete surface and a woman with him, right next to him, was facing the other direction with her head lying on her folded arms that were down on the table. And now they’re on to it, I’m certain. "The drinking and the partying and no rest." "What’s wrong with him?" "You can see his eyes are dark and he speaks in words that make no sense and you really don’t hear what he is saying." "I think he means it now, this time, for real. Like he’s gonna try for real." "Sometimes you gotta be a man. I think he wants it now." The very young girl was asleep now in her mothers lap. Her mother had the look of a tired cocktail waitress at a not-so-upscale casino. And in one of the girls’ pockets of her orange shorts a pack of Marlboro reds were protruding about halfway out. When did it get like that? With his arm outstretched over the seat next to him, in the back, a man just gazed through his very dark sunglasses and did not stop smiling to himself. Outside, a car paused and then went right by the window, a mattress and box springs securely tied down to the hood by two yellow straps pulled very taught, so that they imbedded into the material and raised the ends of the mattress up, which was resting on top of the box springs. And then not two cars later, a second car went by carrying the exact same load of cargo. But the patters of the two sets of white mattresses and box springs were slightly different. But it was easy to see that the two cars were together because the woman in the back car was looking at the man in the car ahead, subtly gesturing to herself in a way that indicated she was thinking of him. A man with a red bandana, just part of it inches coming out from under a hat, belying his status among the Bloods, sat down forcefully next to a small Mexican woman holding tight a bible, quite possibly larger then her own womb. In front of them a man wore a hat backwards brandishing the letter D. That’s when I knew for sure. For some strange reason, there’s horses behind Texas Station. A lot of them. They’re not part of a fair or something transient like that, they’re just there. "I’ve got a seventeen year old, I have always treated him as a person. The only disappointing thing…is his dog sheds all over the place and he never picks up after himself in his room. He had to move back to Oregon. He said he just had to do it. You know, sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do. And you have to respect that." "Yeah, you sure do." "…well, at the office, the worker had been accused of smoking pot. So I called him in and just asked him point blank, did you or have you ever smoked pot? He just stared back at me, you know, tried to stare me down." "Uh huh." "The laws in this state are so different than in Oregon. Up there everything has to be by the book, all the paperwork has to be in order, every little detail has to be right. Down here, they’re just like, if you cross you eyes wrong then, that’s it, you’re fired. The laws in every state are different and I am still getting used to these laws. The judge said I could not turn over his last check. That made no sense to me but it was a court order so I was not about to disobey the law, you know." "Yeah." "So I had to keep it. I don’t know what to do with it. I still have it, in my drawer at the office." "Ha!" "Yeah, I know." Having gotten off a few blocks away by mistake, walking in a daze but not thinking or understanding everything that there is around and being mad at everyone passing and no doubt staring and wondering too, it became clear that things were not going so well. Now looking, now waiting, now watching. Anger rises and falls, a feeling of being second-class and useless, something that needs assistance reigns supreme. Finally arriving and making the connection to the correct location. In the center of a field of dirt where there are rows of circular green bush, bundles of miniature hills made from tiny rocks packed together with dirt, adjacent to a trailer park that looks fairly clean and orderly for a trailer park, right in the center, a shopping cart has been overturned and now lies on its side. There’s no way to deny it anymore. They are on to me. Mila was walked down a dark forest path by his self. As he walked, the forest soon got darker and deeper. It was dusk now and the sun was setting a little quicker then normal but not much more. Then the forest got very dark and mystifying. But Mila kept going. Some of the birds came out at night. They started singing their strange songs so high above, in the trees. The air was fresh and smelled aromatic, almost sensual in nature. Mila was smoking a cigarette and now he finished and paused in the wood, dropped his cigarette in the dirt of the path and stepped on the butt with the toe of one of his shoes, well actually, he was wearing army issue boots and he rubbed it out, back and forth a couple of times.
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