A THING by VALERIE VISNIC
Echoes
In one of the windows on my street, there’s always a light on and it’s probably a lava light but who can say for sure from my vantage on the street beneath. I look in there when I’m down on the street smoking like I’m not supposed to, still. There’s a girl in there, probably, and I wonder if she has vices like I do. I’ve never actually seen this woman I’ve cooked up in the kitchen of my mind. She might not exist, is a thought I’ve had. The light she has in her apartment flickers in blue and pink and a little green, all of those hues on repeat like a psychedelic hiccup. I imagine her dancing to the quivering bright in her living room, like I do. This is what I think about when I’m on the street, smoke furling from my mouth like a madman sitting on the curb making carcinogenic Os for fun. A sharp knife in my pocket, just in case. I imagine the girl in her kitchen making chicken salad, stirring it about. She’s making it in a top hat because she doesn’t have a clean bowl. She could clean one, but no. Then she flips her hat bowl to the top of her head, walking down her steps to the street, chicken salad rolling down the sides of her hair, onto her shoulders. Meeting my glance. We dance in the street to Blank Dog’s She’s Violent Tonight and I spit in the air and it lands on my neighbor’s Subaru and we both laugh and then eat the rest of the chicken salad out of her hat. We dance more in the street. Kissing like dolphins. Slimy and wet. Gray from the smoke. We saunter like magpies to the stairs laid into the land like bumpy slip ‘n slides and we ask those stairs: Hey, take us to the top where there’s something we’ve never seen?
*
The guys who sit on the sidewalk–on their plastic chairs and a few sturdy, regular ones—they own the sidewalk. There’s no deed. But they don’t need one. They have guns. I like them. They’ve done things. I’ve done things. Different things, but the things maybe don’t matter so much as the minds that remember.
I don’t know them intimately, or them me. But I walk by every day and we wave to each other. We make gestures of understanding and I can’t tell what it is we all understand but every time we perform this ritual, I see more than just them. Shadowing each one of them, like wait staff in training, are younger, less molded versions of themselves. Standing there looking wiser. Like how kids can.
They all have spray cans to decorate the sidewalk with permanent tinsel, mailboxes and trashcans. They’ve claimed this stretch of gray and green. The old beauty salon.
Last summer they made a memorial to one of their fallen. And someone changes out the trinkets that bathe the little altar on the street in love and grief and an empty can of Colt 45. Yesterday there was a book on the altar, pages wet and sunburned—flipping up like my slutty skirt the other day. I don’t know what book it is. Feels disrespectful to touch it to see. There’s a battery-operated candle. A few silk flower bunches.
*
If you sit on Sunset Blvd., on the Echo Park side for long enough, you’ll hear the mad roar of ten motorcycles at a time. A dragon with flailing parts made of rubber and black and metal. The men on the bikes pop wheelies and screech down the dark gray stretch of this part of town and when they do it, I feel an indefensible fit of rage shiver up the back of my legs. Meeting my spine with not curiosity nor exhilaration. But instead with plans to kill their sound, their speed. The chaos of many engines spinning with no regard.
Murder in daylight is hard to conceive. Murder is for the dark. Rage is for the walls inside a house, the ones inside my mind. And only those, so help me god.
If you sit on Sunset Blvd., on the Echo Park side for long enough, you’ll hear a man talking to himself in a mean tone and he wants to murder. Murder the silence and the looks and the blaring inside his head. He won’t drown out the motorcycles that will again parade down the road in front of you, but he’ll try. Running down the street after another wheeled dragon, pacing back and forth in front of the coffee shop with mint green tables and chairs and people waiting in long lines that make long lines feel cool and precious like how secrets do.
If you sit on Sunset Blvd., on the Echo Park side for long enough, you won’t be able to hear your own thoughts, which is why if you’ve been running from those sorts of things for long enough, this stretch of Sunset is the exact place in the world to be. The only place in the world to be.
Valerie Visnic is a writer and astrologer living in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in drip Literary Magazine, Points in Case, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first book, “It’s Never Just One Thing," an experimental collection of non-fiction stories and refractions.