Birthright

The blonde girl sat on the top step outside the Guardian Angel cathedral. She wore mourning blue, dark and conservative: a pleated skirt, a clean blouse with a tailored jacket buttoned too high, a wide-brimmed hat. She had pinned a wilted mum to her lapel. She tilted her face to the church with its stained glass windows illuminated from within. A night service carried on. She heard singing, an organ. It was a place of grief strangely juxtaposed against a celebratory city. On the high stone steps, people often remarked about the general lack of respect shown by tourists as they motored past the sanctuary. Dori smoked a cigarette and watched traffic crawl by. Her knees were pressed together but there was a view up her skirt if you got the right angle. White panties worn with no hose. Someone honked. Her gaze darted and flickered like a bird’s, but she didn’t adjust her ankles.

Sometimes she came to these things. People asked her how she knew so-and-such and vague answers sufficed. Dori knew them from the neighborhood, from school, from volunteering at the hospital… she could pick up all sorts of life details from an obit. She looked nonthreatening and half the time, people tuned out her answers because they had only asked to be polite, to show some semblance of proper decorum.

It was warm tonight. She considered peeling off her jacket and blouse and sitting there in a thin undershirt, where she would be mistaken for a half-dressed drunk. Someone would offer to walk her home, and maybe they’d be decent and do so, or maybe they’d steer her into a gritty corner to take advantage. Once she had taken a life that way… let him feel her up, exclaim over her innocence, and then –

Pffft

– she crumpled her fist and his life sifted away like dirt through her fingers. Quietly.

Dori scraped her shoe against the concrete and listened to the music from a car's open windows.

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