Friday, January 10, 2014

The Girl in the Pink Floyd shirt (fragment)

The door banged shut behind her and she smiled. The Atlanta sunshine fell across her shoulder, a warm joy to her. She took a deep breath and laughed. She felt the edges of the brick pavement with her toes through the soft leather of her moccasins. She took two steps across the sidewalk and pirouetted off the curb. A dog barked at her and she laughed again.
"Hello Jack Russell!" she said to the terrier, merrily wagging his tail for the joy of seeing her. "Hello Mrs Green" she said to the dog's mistress, a retired woman who lived nearby.
She walked up the street for a moment and stopped in front of the cafe, turned around and looked back up the way she'd come and waved at someone else she knew.
She loved Five Points. Loved it in the quiet mornings and busy evenings. She loved the used bookstores with their ever-changing stock and sweet shy men who could never quite talk to her. She loved the five different radio stations you might hear walking down the street. She loved the smell of marijuana that signaled someone having a good time someplace. She loved the graffiti and stores named for the old business their building held fifty years ago. She loved the friends and acquaintances and strangers speaking creole or Spanish or an eastern European, Russian? any one of a dozen languages. She loved the surprise of a warm winter day and a cool summer night and her second story apartment at the top of the hill where the view of sunsets beyond downtown were always amazing. She loved the kids on skateboards and the college kids excited about the movie they're going to see tonight and the Playhouse with its old posters for The Fantasticks and Annie, Our Town and The Iceman Cometh. She loved the way everything looked and felt like it was sixty years old and still alive and breathing.
She loved her town in the middle of the city.

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