Part III

she stands at the curb and hails a taxi with the adroitness of the purposeful. a typical yellow black checkered vehicle halts impersonally ahead of her. she steps into its cigarrettecologne tinged interior, its well traveled space. how she has flown to get here, railed, ferried, crossed bodies, gotten all her passes torn in two. a journey of the heart, following its strings attached, entangled. like a fly in a net she is wrapped closer, tighter, pulled in to the waiting. but these fangs she feels above her head are hers. she tugs her skirt around her legs and watches the silent flurry of the world pass in to segmented distance.
cold-blooded, they will say. reptilian monster. but she feels her blood’s warm coursing through her veins. she can no longer pretend, not after watching her child die, passing away into invisibility from underneath her pleading hands, his rising and falling chest stilling, silent, unresponsive.
there is only one end for all of us, she knows. she watches her reflection in the glass passing over the rushing streets. it is a matter of how you meet it.
she will meet him. thought is no longer relevant to her. it is not a matter of plotting, getting things right, setting them straight. it is a matter now of moving forward, slipping into her destiny, riding the tide of her emotion until she hits the shore, beached, naked. she will not be stopped. she will spill out into the waiting mouth of the earth, and it will be too late, too late, too late. the driver looks at her periodically in the rear-view. he coughs sometimes into his hand, threading the cab through the bustling color lighted streets, cars pressing around each other in a herd, breathing, roaring, sudden beeps. here she sits in its midst, alone, detached in her brooding, sheltered in the machine. moving all together alone. together alone all moving.