FIB: The Woman Upstairs
The woman upstairs is dyed blond and the roots of her short thick curls show. She wears orange florescent green florescent yellow florescent capri pants in summer and very tight, ass-hugging jeans in winter. When she walks up the piazza her butt seems to do all the work while her legs are only along for the ride. She shakes her rugs on my clean clothes, she lets drip her wet clothes onto my dry ones. I don’t like the woman upstairs.
Some nights her and her boyfriend have screaming matches. They go after each other as if their words were sharpened; as if they are relieving themselves of a pain by digging into the wound of the other. Then they turn on the TV, very loud, and dumb it all away. The TV also comes on at eleven sharp, above my window where I do my writing. It is very loud. I sometimes wonder what someone’s brain feels like after watching TV, very loud, at eleven in the morning on such fine days. And then I stop wondering because it must feel like mush. Mush, with bits of florescent green peas, for color or texture.
Her husband gets up at the rise of the sun and is out working all day. Piazza gossip says his mother is up there too and so deaf that she wouldn’t hear the fireworks if they were set off next to her head. Maybe the woman upstairs doesn’t like her life very much. For sometimes, when I pass her in the street and her eyes focus well beyond my head, I look at her tightly drawn florescent pink lips and her far drawn eyes, I feel she is trying to grasp for something but she doesn’t know what. She’s trying to find the reason for who she has become among all the mush. I’m not sure she’ll ever find it. Then I think that some people must be made as zombies and the woman upstairs must be one of them.
This is another addition of Fridays in Bracciano every Friday!
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