If I stay in the car too long I might find them out. Recognize something in that moldy odor of resin. Too familiar. They cover it with cherry or musk cardboard-cutouts. When they sense I'm on to them they distract me in other ways. A week ago this cabbie starts up with: "I'm a big animal lover starting way back in the fifties and I've got a drum in my stomach that tells me so" -and my mind was blown to bits. Flapping remains of my face and that little bit of lip and tongue smiled back and said "Well yes, aren't animals great." The next thing I knew I was paying and stepping out and up, my face smooth, sealed, as if it never happened. I wanted to tell someone but I forgot about what they were hiding.

It's in the blood.

My family's blood is seeped in transience. Where darkness is uncluttered and thoughts rip out of your head when you're sitting in some new diner in some new city. First, your hand looks all skin colored. The raised parts of it show another color which could be named "oil blue" but there are many colors in blood. Red pales into non-color, into the white of the table. The hand on the edge of the ceramic cup turns porcelinized. All dissolve into a white-gray backdrop for the sugar packets with those fresh bright slashes of color. Brown and yellow campy animals.

Once I saw a dead fish weeded into the back seat of a cab. Luminous rainbow scales on red plush. Didn't say a word about the stink. Gave the cabbie a good tip too.

Every evening when my father reached drunk I knew he was thinking about the furniture, the appliances, and how they interfere with the colors of darkness. All kinds of appliances, broken, out of use. Located on hidden sawdust shelves in the basement the garage. Boxes of things from different families: leather tap shoes, baby bottles, a popcorn maker with a pink cover, a popcorn maker with a blue tinted viewer.

To one of like mind darkness becomes cluttered and gives you trouble in your sleep. I should know.

Summertime and the fly strips crackling in our suburban backyard. All that energy with the tranquil pool, artifice blue and heavy.

Dark figures hiding out. Police in our bushes again and they come in through the basement windows which haven't been sealed since the last time. They wait where the storage boxes are full of all those things.

The father put the end of the gun in the sea-shell center of his daughter's ear. I was looking at the carpeting. All those grooves went round in circles with paths that led back to where they began- no out. The carpeting held things, spills of orange juice chocolate milk vomit booze, all spilled.The essence the moment locked in the stain no matter what cleanser. He looked at it he broke and the carpet breathed like a shore washed lungfish. Then they had him down and I'm being tossed about. But I knew. I understood.

Hands. Bulletproof jackets. The last one with the square jaw. I flared out my nostrils a few times like I was going to lose it just so he'd press me into him. I hid my smile in his neck.

Powder-faced and fish eyed, a counsellor sits across from me, her skin strains under the pressure of her veins but there's a cool porcelain white about the irises. She snatches at the inevitable drama. And I try to make it good for her from somewhere within and beyond that night of bright lights but all that comes are the waves in my ear. And the tactile and olfactory, stiffness, abrasiveness of those bulletproof vests against my bare arms. An odor of new synthetic fabric, faint at first then a command to pungent fear. Seasalt, cream smell oil. Scent of urchins shedding gametes at the moment of death.

I try to find words in my memory to release me from the windowless air-conditioned office. Past the revolving doors into sun-warmed afternoon wind.

Mother sunbathing. Pasting sequence on Styrofoam. Sunlight sublime.

Passing time until Christmas.

A great cloud came upon us and chilled chemically treated lawns, raised my skin. As if the earth froze and all the people died. The last things they were doing trapped them. With the boxes in the basement. I saw mothers thoughts in white bright letters and dissolve above her oiled body: "Oh god I'm dying roast in oven where's my husband I love you mommy hold me is there god fear yes yes."

And all the time looking at my ear blaming my ear.

I thought about how fucking and furniture are inverses.

Then the word "sentiment" came to mind and how it rings like different words like "cemetary" and "mint" or "sweet breathless death." I knew then what the best thing in life for me to be was.

Now I remember the important things, the synthetic homey feel of cabs, knowing when I get out they will go and pick up someone else. Knowing I can catch one in any city.

Cabs are the inverse of furniture.

The counsellor was still waiting. Her carpeting was just as bad as ours but without the grooves. Tight with yarny wools sticking up. I knew dust flakes of powder and terror of children had spiraled deep within them. All the things that carpet held. The carpet in our living room, my own room, my parents bedroom. All the carpets at other people's houses: brown teal peach shagged shaven carpets creeping out of homes spreading across porches. Synthetic moss over chemical lawns under fences smearing secrets. People of the world sinking into them.

Carpets were bad luck like furniture and popcorn makers. I hit the road to become a prostitute.

She wore blue mascara better than anyone back home. I thought her lashes grew that way right out of her skin.

Jonni arched her back and squinted her eyes, milky tissue paper hair falling about her. Body shaking with the buzzing crackling sound of cicadas and warm ocean air around us. Then she mechanically opened her mouth as if by mistake and threw me a crooked smile just before she showed them her tits, and I was thinking she's made of some amazing blue electricity.

They always come in Impalas, Corvettes, blasting stereos as if that would shepherd us in.

A group of us were running from them and I didn't know Jonni from the rest of the girls. Me and Jonni broke ahead. We made it to the fences and even when one sends someone out or gets out of the car himself, they can't run as fast as us, not while wearing all that shit and they just can't do the fences.

In Miami there are fences everywhere.

It was all street and free and in and out of cabs, cars, beds, sitting out in parking lots, straddling fences, chewing gum, Marlboro Lights, sizzle rocks, wearing any old thing, a red bandana makes a nice top and Jonni's wearing a yellow one.

Hot pulsing colors.

And Jonni's soft murmers into my sea shell ear and suddenly all in stereo and warm dry land. Andit was all jump start running, half a 7-11 sandwich in my mouth the other half digesting.

My leg got infected from not clearing that spiked fence, yellow fish push wept out of the hole crusting as it hit dry air. I thought I'd have to go to the hospital and get screwed another way. Jonni rubbed Wild Turkey right into my second wound and said being caught means living indoors and it was "freelance or fuck it" and I'd say that over and over in my mind's mind.

And the first time we ran it was as if we were squirrels. We cleared that fence and won. I looked at Jonni and she flashed them before I did. She must have been doing it all along. Just like me but alone. We ran away together into warm summer warm, laughing, distant barking fading out.

Fences around every corner.

Jonni once told me she took off because "Every day was just every day" and then she spit on the gravel and made it hiss, and I saw a blue glow around her and the splash sound of the ocean was suddenly in my ear as if all that water had moved a couple of blocks closer to the park we were sitting at.

I can hear everything now.

Then everything became all underwater slow and Jonni's face changed to no color - an erased static TV face. I tried to tell her about the carpets but then she stuck her gum in my mouth. Dizzy I sucked on the warm strawberry wad before I chewed and I thought I wanted to run with Jonni forever.

Same night she pet a black cat.

Jonni was caught in a fenceless alleyway and I started hanging with girls fresh off the bus. The kind that are thinking about becoming models. Jonni showed up in a dream facing the wall of a carpeted air conditioned room. I ditched my last pack of strawberry gum. Lipstick made lips redder but I needed some crazy blue electricity to hold everything up.

Like some great warning came the stomach pains. On a toilet in a Howard Johnson's a dark cloud bled into white. An alleyway smear in the cotton panel of my panties: brown and red with the residue of smokes, late nights, chocolates, and cum, and I'm thinking it's some kind of sign. Charlottes web in my crotch. Or the end of the world. Then I figured things out and bought a box of Kotex. Made a collect call home.

High school, freshman year. I made the track team.