Wendy or Gertie or Edith

We're on the bus again. We're on the bus and the wheels are breathing and the engine is burning and children are staring at the bone-white vagaries that dangle from adult ears. The sky has this distant kind of yellow, the kind of yellow you see in sun-curled pages of aging books, the kind of yellow that spills with its own dust, that cracks with its own weight, that spins with its own sins. There are towers and spines and suns and spirals that stand like knife points against the fleshy yellow belly of the noontime sun and we watch them pass outside the windows.

Because we're on the bus again and there's this woman. She's sitting across from me see, and she's not quite aware that we’re there but she's just sitting there, waiting for her destination and spooning this ice cream from a cup into mouth. It is the most disgusting ice cream I've ever seen. Baskin Robbins or Dairy Queen or something and it is the biggest, ugliest, most grotesque way to eat ice cream that I think has ever been invented.

The city outside the windows of the bus was flaming, screaming and burning with the smoke ready to choke and feel and drown. Things hadn't been good that August and now things were on fire. That's sort of the way it goes sometimes.

And all the way this woman is spooning this melting pile into her mouth. She's got these slithered kind of eyes, sparkling like a silverfish and used for scanning newspapers as they blow down the street; these homeless sort of eyes that sleep under sidewalks and soda fountains. She was a sucker for celebrity gossip. I could just tell. And she bathed her kids in bathwater she had just finished using herself. She had 17 children, or maybe 32 children in all, some with the same names, some with the same faces, and by the time she got to bathing the last kid the water was black like the smoke piling up outside. Her name was something like Wendy or Gertie or something like Edith. A middle-aged woman withered with an old woman’s name.

The city outside the windows of the bus was abuzz with vultures. They were like a crowd of disturbed flies. Mentally disturbed. The kind of flies you have to lock up in institutions so they don’t hurt you, hurt me, hurt themselves, hurt each other, so they don’t hurt the President of the United States of America or his designated successors. Except they weren’t flies, they were vultures and so they were free from the hospitals, free from treatment and feasting on the dead bodies in the streets. They sat on those streets, climbing over the bodies and buildings and block parties. They took off from flaming roofs. They took off from smoking streets and dive-bombed the bus. The vultures lived in the smoke. They loved the smoke and they fed on the August fires.

And all the way this woman is spooning this melting pile into her mouth. Her lips, her lips look the way that those disembodied lips in commercials look. The way the Rolling Stones logo looks. Ugly, swollen, distended, obscene, like your mother in lingerie. Those lips look like all the seas, and the sun and seven different kinds of animal fat have been pumped into them until they're less like lips and more like apples rippling under flesh, less like lips then a whole collection of lips squeezed together and fucking each other. And yet her teeth are so tiny, little gravestones behind the monsoon of her spreading stain of a mouth.

The city outside of the windows was destitute and broken and abandoned. No one on the streets, no one brave enough to face those flaming buildings and humming vultures. Any one who’s any one is on this bus, most of them children. Some of them adults. Then there’s me and you and this woman here.

I nudge you with my elbow. "Are you seeing this?"

"Seeing what?"

I jerk my chin in her direction. Subtle-like. "Watch her."

A big gooey dollop of ice cream dribbles off the spoon and into the cavern bored through her face. She licks her lips with Jabba the Hut's tongue.

"Oh my god," you say. "That's fucking disturbing." And when you say that I know exactly what you mean. Between the movies and the internet and video games, we've seen all kind of horrible things together. We've seen dead babies, real dead babies, amputation videos, the Saw franchise of movies, government torture, mutilated soldiers, horse porn, pregnancy porn, the Faces of Death gore-video series. And here’s this woman, this woman with the ice cream, and she’s disturbing our delicate sensibilities.

She lets another dollop dribble into her mouth. My god, my god I can't look away. Neither can you. She's spooning this dripping chinawhite cream between them, collected from the branches of trees, collected from the mountaintops and bedsheets of firemen and prostitutes. She’s licking her lips, smacking them. She lets it roll over her lips and tongue, lets it play over the back of her throat, like a lover’s limbs. My god.

Turns out Edith was raped in a garden at the age of 17, we decide. She spent several weeks wandering through the streets trying, trying, trying to remember what the fuck had just happened, what had stolen her breath and forced her hands. The man in the silver mask was an old friend she thought maybe. Maybe he was. But then again maybe not, maybe the man who had forced her open was a stranger she had never seen before and would never see again no matter how long she lived, no matter how hard she searched. But his hands seemed familiar, his tongue was a memory but still but still...

Her husband, who I decided was named Tom or Frank or Franklin Douglas, was awake when she finally came home. She never told him a thing. He only wanted to know where she had been not what she might have done, not what might have been done to her. He had spent time in the salt mines, his work took him under the world, under the clouds, to dig and plow and smash and break free huge chunks of salt. He didn't have enough time or energy left at the end of the work day to care about her actions, only her locations. When their seventh baby arrived and looked nothing like him, he didn’t think too much of it. Recessive traits and all. Plus, she had some pretty ugly cousins, maybe it was just those same genes resurfacing. Cousin Jene's gimpy nose. Uncle Pete's lazy eye. But it was weird the baby was wearing a silver mask as it escaped Edith's womb. That one was your idea.

Franklin Douglas asked her if she wanted some ice cream in the delivery room. He got her some. And now 25 years later she was eating it the same way. Oh Edith, oh Wendy, oh whatever the fuck your name is, I love you I love you I love you. Take me away with you, take me away from you and these Augustinian fires and these vultures and this dim yellow sky and the whales and the pomegranate tea and the smoke and the living, breathing sector of human experience. Take me away from the silver masks.

She gets up, gets off the bus, throws the remains of her ice cream cup at the vultures on the ground and they do battle most vicious and fierce for its creamy contents. She walks into a building spewing smoke from its third floor windows.

It’s time for Edith to bathe the kids.