“If you can’t get laid, get a laugh.”
She said with a smile that somehow just avoided humiliating me. Had she been trying to? We both looked around, the room was a glimmering star field, dark and somber furniture transformed by the slowly settling cloud of glitter.
“It will clean up,” she concluded.
“No it won’t, it’s glitter. Glitter never goes away, it’s the herpes of craft supplies. Look, I’m sorry -”
“Don’t be, really.”
She smiled again, it was disarming almost to the point of emasculation. She was a big woman. Which is not to say overweight, but she was built on an industrial scale, just a little to large and a little to perfect to seem real. A small curvy woman magnified, as if I was merely standing too close, or looking at her through a lens. She was taller than I, and her hand, when she held it out to me, looked oversized and strong. It enveloped my own in a soft warm implacability, a friendly but immovable grip. Her nails were elegantly shaped, painted subtle red.
“I accept,” she said.
I looked at her eyes, and realized I hadn’t, not really, before now. The smile was reflected in them like the sun in a lake, but there was more there, something intent, nervous.
“You’re sure?”
Her eyes sought something in my face, they peered out from behind the veil of her looming good humor, as if they might like to duck away behind the smile again. I felt kinship to them, they and I would both hide away and look out from the shadows, but were driven to exposure by the sense of possibility that now seemed to pervade the sparkling room.
I felt my fingers dig into her hand and realized they were no longer hanging there dormant in her warm grip, but holding onto her, seeking to draw from her hand something that matched the subtle vulnerability in her eyes.
“Ok,” I said, “lets do this thing.” Like falling, like I had been hanging by my fingertips for so long I didn’t even know it until I let go, I smiled back at her.
Glitter by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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