The song of Carolann

Carolann’s roots are showing. Her bottle blond is three weeks old. She presently has her hair in a ponytail that tickles the base of her neck when she tilts her head back to empty a bit more of the Boone’s Farm strawberry wine down her raw throat. It is three in the afternoon on a Tuesday and she is in her black Mazda Protégé 5, which is parked on 42^nd Ave. North where it intersects the parkway.

She parked here this morning waiting for a man. She is playing amateur detective. Joe Lee left her house in the waning moments of a 72-hour marathon of fucking, drinking, smoking, and snorting.

Carolann had been spurned; disrespected as woman the way she saw it. Carolann is not a woman who takes insult easily.

She knew Joe Lee passed this way often and she hoped to find out what he does during the day. She hoped to find demons to hold above him. She hoped to prove she is, in fact, better than him, despite what he shouted towards her on a hazy weekend morning.

The dark circles under her gray eyes have been permanent badges since the first night she snorted crystal meth. She went to drug counseling once, a year into her addiction. She heard herself say, “The first time is so fucking good, it is orgasmic. I felt myself wet all over. Every time I’ve done meth since I’ve been trying to reach that height again.”

This was a lucidity and deepness of thought she reached then, but never before and not since.

The late afternoon sun beared down and her skin cooked; ashen, wrinkled, and used. Her twenty-five year old body looked like a forty-five year old trailer park grandmother’s.