Aaron Rowley is a biomedical engineering senior and Mustang Daily fiction contributor.
She reclines deeply into the paling blue vinyl of the seats, scans briefly over the knife-scratched initials and hard water stains, and spots a young man propped up against the charcoal guard rail. Black ink escapes the rolled-up cuffs of his button-down, snakes down his forearms and morphs into the first letter of the blocky-text “cero” stamped onto the back of his hand.
He combs it through his blond hair; gelled and arching above the black pair of horn-rims evoking a mid-20th century financier, maybe journalist. His vivid green sneakers are the only thing that ground him in the current decade. With suave, pursed lips, he looks through the window and meets her gaze. She holds it, long enough to teeter on flirting, before pushing past the sidewalks, railings and brutalist monoliths that punctuate the car-logged grid toward a small patch of blue fading into the grey.
Cold fronts had brought a frigid end to what was otherwise a pleasant summer. She rubs her arms. Despite years in this city, she was a stranger to segues and most certainly lacked the foresight to interpret shifting skies. Until the branches bowed and the Golden Gate ushered in the silver cover slicing its peaks, until the windows wept of all-day dew, until the people pulled up collars and scarves, buried their chins in jackets, and the cars all sighed steam, she forged on with fashionable reluctance.
Perhaps it is time, she thinks, to hide beneath fleece rather than suffer through tight breaths and the pink-skin bite of the cold. But she enjoyed her legs, and found winter wear to be rather stifling.
The train wheels squeal and the car lurches. She feels the lingering eyes of the lensed railing man and teases the idea of reassuring his curiosity with one final glance, but the aging train is a bit quicker than her decisions. She catches “cero” before it whips past the rain-stained window.
She reaches into a small bag; repurposed burlap from an emptied coffee bag lost on the side of a pier-house down by the wharf. On hot days, she could still make out the subtleties of the Arabica beans. Today, she held the bag close to her nose, inhaled slowly and found nothing but asphalt and piss.
I really shouldn’t leave this on the ground anymore, she thinks. A quiet black stain has already begun to make its way into the bottom of the bag. Another sign that summer is over, she thinks, how quickly it soaks up the saturated sweat of the city’s sidewalks. She watches the last of the building tops disappear behind the boxy houses stacked upon hills, attempts to brush the filth from her bag and realizes that even beauty can be built on a foundation of grime.
From the bag, she pulls a booklet. Its surface is clean and the pages romantically blank. She pulls the pen that she always keeps tucked behind her ear, pushes the tip to the paper and spots a single strand of her hair flutter away. It flies onto the window and hovers on a small gust pumping through the air conditioning vent. It’s a brilliant, brilliant orange. She had just dyed it. It was a spur of the moment decision, too. Despite her age, despite the many blurred nights of dancing and strangers, of bright lights and conversations, she felt mundane. Blended, even.
She remembers lying in her tub as she gave her hair the first rinse; streams of glow arced across her breasts, slid down her stomach, tickled her toes before spiraling down the gargle of her rusted drain. With meticulous precision she had coated her entire head from tip to scalp with paste, even laughing at her image in the mirror; all tin-foil and goo. Suddenly, her desolate apartment tucked against the freeway emerged as something more meaningful. A sense of poignancy traced her curves with a peculiar sensuality, and she recalled her first time stepping foot in the apartment. It had reeked of cigarettes, and the wanderers in the alley below filled the pause between songs on her stereo with the drone of their mumbled conversations.
Left only with isolation, she tended to her soft spots. Grew a teetering garden on the windowsill. Rendered dreams into ink on the walls. Tried her hand at cooking, baking — stir fry was her forte. She took great pains to cultivate a renewed sense of purpose in that small studio. But despite the many tangible dispositions turned renovations, she stood in her apartment one night, a small puddle sliding into the creases of the wooden floors, observing nothing but a mottled apartment with scars of someone wishing to change.
That same night, she turned her favorite song to full volume, and watched her hair dance shadows and orange in the spotlight of her lamp.
She hit replay twice. She had emerged, with a keen awareness of how silly and futile her attempts at rejuvenation had been. In front of her mirror, still steaming and naked and orange-headed, she felt rare. Sexy, even.
Back on the train, the hair whips into the silent river of stale recycled air and is gone. She sighs, twice, and looks down to her booklet. The ink had bled cobwebs into the first few pages. Realizing she has nothing to write about, she dogears the fifth page, which resisted the spread of ink, and places the booklet back into the bag. There is a picture in her pocket, Giorgio de Chirico, which she pulls out and places against the window. It had come in the mail two days prior, on the eve of her anniversary with the city. On the back, someone had scrawled Traded a genuine pair of late 1800 spectacles for this little one at a swap meet somewhere in central california – old fool didn’t know what he was holding. Knew you’d like it. I miss you. I’ll be at the lighthouse on the 27th. Supposed to be beautiful.
She breathes heavily onto the picture, removes it from the window, and watches the moving scenery slide through her fogged frame. An old recycling plant bore heaps of reddish metal, beyond which stretched the sullen brown of marshy land. The industrial yards wore off after a few minutes, yielded a quick flash of the bay, before swiftly converting into track homes and school yards.
Even old ties refuse to languish in their separation. She supposes that maybe it was finally alright to talk again — wonders what the conversation will feel like in her newfound skin. She shakes out her orange hair and giggles to herself. You know, she thinks, I just might keep this for a while. If she had felt this flood of spunk and youth, she may just have winked at the railing man, may have just traced grace up from cero to linger on his neck.