Criminal Conversation

Luretta walked through this evening spread against the sky, seeing this place where she lived with laser-beam eyes. White-hot laser cutting through the jiveass dealers on every corner, pushing their six-bit hits off of crack pipes. White-hot eyes burning through hookers no older than herself strutting like movie stars in high heels and silk, selling blowjobs to cruising motorists for twenty bucks a throw. Her ears tuned out the incessant word fuck that rang on the air like a one-note call-and-response. Her ears closed to the screaming police sirens, and the screaming fire engines, and the rapping of the automatic pistols, and the rage everywhere, the white-hot rage reduced to cold dead ashes by her white-hot eyes and her indifferent ears. She wished to be Eliot’s hyacinth girl, her arms full, her hair wet, speechless, neither living nor dead, looking into the heart of light, the silence. He had written of a heap of broken images where the sun beat. He had written of a cry of fear in a handful of dust. Walking alone and breathing deeply of a night turned suddenly gentle by the first flush hint of summer, Luretta wished with all her heart that Sarah Fitch Welles was still alive to show her what roots might clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish.