Vogue Silhouette

A little girl spent her days wandering the streets of the city without a home and without a friend.  Her mother had died recently, and with no one to watch over her she ran away, fearing that social services would put her in a home unsuitable to her upbringing.  The girl was ten years of age, maybe 11, dressed in rags and gray towels, and only ate from the dumpsters of back-alley restaurants.  Her favorite food was ice cream, but since it always melted before she could scavenge it out of the garbage, she was never able to have any.  Instead, the poor girl had to settle for contaminated bread and meat, which she'd get horrid food poisoning from time to time.  When she was lucky enough to find that someone had thrown away a full-course entree, she'd get to spend an evening without the trouble of her daily search for food. 

One evening, while digging through more garbage and finding no luck, a dark shadow came upon her and asked her what her name was.  The voice was cool and slimy; it made the girl think of snakes, so she cowered away from him.  Looking upon him, she couldn't see his face, for it was hidden behind the shadows of a building.  Not responding, she slowly retreated backwards, holding the core of an apple to her bosom as if in offering.  The man stepped out of the shadows and revealed himself to be another homeless person, with a sordid beard, wild eyes, and an aura that was formidable to her.  The man smelled so bad from weeks of unwashed body odor and cigarettes that she nearly vomited right in front of him.  He asked her what she was running away from.  When he took another step closer, she said it was him that she was running away from, then took off running down the alley.  In mid-stride she lifted a piece of broken glass from the ground, thinking it would threaten him.  The sweet little girl would never hurt a fly, and she knew that she couldn't hurt this man no matter how much he might hurt her, but she hoped the glass would at least buy her some time to run away should he retreat and seek a weapon.  As his footsteps gained on her from behind, she wondered what he wanted.  Was it money, a friend, love?  She wanted those things too, but they were not for her, and clearly not for him.  She didn't like the evil look in his eyes, she didn't like it at all. 

"I just want to talk to you!", he called after her. 

When she reached the end of the alley, with nowhere to hide, she flashed the glass shard at her pursuer, hoping to scare him off. 

"Please," he panted.  "I just want to show you my toys.  They're fun to play with." 

The evil gleam was back in his eyes as he smirked into a lopsided grin.  She yelled at him to go away.  When he approached her again, ignoring the threat of her weapon, she dropped it and flew through a broken window in the building off to her side. 

 

She's crying they don't want her they left her out in the cold abandoned and starving, lonesome and wandering aimlessly the restless streets of this heartbreaking city how did it come to be like this?  I'm lost and I can't find my way home, where is my mommy who will take care of me when will I stop crying why is this man chasing me Get me out of here God please did I deserve this did I kill my mother No no it can't be she was only trying to save me she was only trying to.... 

 

Pain, the King of Depression, feeding on the tears of innocent daughters.  Release her, release her from this Hell.  Just to love her, how much can one bear?  Rejection cuts like a blade, ever so easily, through the skin of her lovely body, tarnishing fictions of happy youth.  When the sun fell, when life slipped away from her hands, when her hands were empty and reaching, grasping for another hand lent, nothing was there, not the bones of her father, not the flesh of her mother, not even the scorn of her teachers' ridicule.  What's life for if the people we depend on most aren't there to pick us up when the worst things happen?   

 

I never meant to hurt anyone I want my dolls what happened to my belongings all the smiles her motherly touch and how am I supposed to lay here gasping for air as the ugly man punches his fist through the wall.... 

 

She gets up and runs out of the room with the broken window and finds herself in the odd surroundings of a photographer's paraphernalia- the jazzy sets, the angular props, some brilliantly choreographed sculptures that enhance movement, black and white photographs of innumerable subjects captured on the retina of life and stolen away into the past, trapped in time like the prison cell of a ghost.  Naked mannequins and colorful construction paper are littered about a triangular room with various tripods, cameras, large reflectors, light boxes... 

 

What is this bedazzling new world I've entered Who must it be that makes rooms like these Rooms that I've never seen before Certainly no ordinary person Probably an artist or someone who likes to take pictures but why do they need pictures to express themselves and I wonder what they look like and what kind of friends they have? 

 

In another room, not far from where the girl is hiding, an intriguing mixture of jazz and lounge pop is gyrating a record player, the music smoothly excreted from it by currents of perfume and the smoke from joss sticks containing incense and marijuana.  A man with sharp eyebrows and a lingering gaze has his hands on the nylon stockings of a veiled woman reclining away from him.  The man looks to her right and on the desk he sees a dancing olive playing a miniature saxophone beside a purple martini holding a jagged pink straw.  Neon lights align the wall, and the man finds that the olive uses the lighting to its advantage, in the full extent of its vaudeville talent.  He takes a whiff from the joint in his hands while retaining a dignified, elitist posture- those perceptive eyes shaded by the suave movement of his arm.  The woman is wondering when and if the man will make the first move as she exhales swirling clouds of smoke in their ritzy amphitheater. 

"Would you care for a shot of liquor?", he asks, curt and calculating in his well-groomed tuxedo and concubine, a fedora tilted sideways, the same angle as a taxicab sputtering down a city street at night with music notes drifting out of its exhaust in one of the room's paintings.  He detects a faint smile behind the fishnets of her veil as she inhales the hallucinogens from a joss stick of her own, head inclined, and black waistband shaped like the postmodern lamp behind her. 

"Shoot me all you like," she winked. 

 

I'm here writing on the grass.  My dress is yellow, and the breeze gives it life.  Sometimes I think my dress will lead me away from here.  I like to imagine that it becomes animated when the wind blows and takes me with it wherever it is blowing.  But do I even exist, or have I become the dress?  I don't know what to think anymore.  I feel nothing and I want to die.  Maybe my dress can make me someone else, someone who won't be rejected, someone who loves herself.  But until then, I'll just write in my journal, never talk to anyone, and wait for the windstorm of suicide to take me away.   

 

Later she'll transform, but she doesn't know it yet.  We all become temporarily disabled when we are exposed to hostile environments at ages when we can't control anything.  The girl knows this, but she doesn't know how to be patient yet. 

 

Clive and Velma hear a noise.  Clive with his sharp eyebrows sneaks up on the hobo holding the little girl to the ground.  He hits him over the head with a bottle of white wine, sending shards of glass flying about one of his monochrome dark rooms.  Clive the photographer helps her up and asks if she is ok, a rhetorical question considering the tears in her dress and the blood on her face. 

The woman stands in the doorway and frowns at the little girl, correctly inferring there was a recent tragedy in her life, based on her appearance. 

"Why did you run away, darling?", she asked 

"To escape photographs", she says enigmatically. 

At this the man beamed and knelt next to her, "Photographs that don't get developed are the hardest to let go." 

Velma added, "Who needs to shoot when the loveliest vision of all falls right into your hands.  Take her, Clive." 

It took the girl many months to warm up to the benevolent artists.  Trust is the hardest thing in the world to get back once you've lost it.  And the more you've lost it, the more difficult it becomes.  But the girl would dance with time and weave a colossal fortune with her new parents, so that when the wind finally came to blow the dress away, it was trapped on her body, inside a developed picture, residing in a homely frame.